Abstract
These words of a desperate poet unable to get to sleep plunge us immediately into the midst of the problematic which will interest us here: the question of falling asleep. All of us know of the conflicts and exasperations which surround not being able to fall asleep. We all remember those nights when we tried everything but without success; on the contrary, the more we exerted ourselves the more awake we became. The insomniac tosses and turns in his bed, continually changes position, sighs, squeezes his eyes shut, stops the clock that is two rooms away, puts cotton in his ears, is warm and cold in turns, listens to his heartbeat, tries all the well-known tricks without success — and then in an unguarded moment falls asleep. One day he picks up a textbook on psychology only to discover to his amazement that falling asleep is not dealt with in it. Why is this so? Why is it that so little attention is paid to such an important subject as falling-asleep which either happens each night or fails to happen? According to Kleitman who devoted 600 pages to the subject of “Sleep and Wakefulness” a special description of the psychic state of one who suffers from insomnia is superfluous as all of us sooner or later go through this torment.2 If we want to know why we are tormented and how we can fight insomnia, it seems a conversation with falling asleep is the only thing left for us. We wish to question this phenomenon and try to understand it in its essential structure.
“A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by, One after one; the sound of rain, and bees Murmuring; the fall of rivers, wind and seas, Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky; I have thought of all by turns, and yet do lie Sleepless!…”
W. Wordsworth1
“Over het inslapen” appeared originally in Dutch in Tijdschrift voor Philosophie, 14 (1952), pp. 207–264. Reprinted by permission of the Editor. Translated for this volume by Joseph J. Kockelmans.
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Reference
W. Wordsworth, “To sleep”, Sonnet XIV in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. III (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1946), p. 8.
N. Kleitman, Sleep and Wakefulness (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 380–381. This work contains a very useful bibliography on sleep of over 1,400 items, mainly physiological in orientation.
Quoted in L.R. Müller, Ueber den Schlaf (Berlin: Springer, 1940), p. 38.
By “sleep” we understand the deep, dreamless sleep. In how far such a sleep occurs is not in question here because we may take it, at any rate, as a limit. Dream-consciousness to which a special chapter should be devoted is excluded from our further analysis.
Cf. for the problematic concerning experiencing: P.Th. Hugenholtz, “Over het beleven en de belevingswereld,” Nederlandsch Tijdschrift voor Psychologie, Nieuwe Reeks, 6(1950). Concerning these considerations we note, however, that we are unable to share Hugenholtz’s ideas about the “autonomy” of experience. Cf. infra, sect. 4.
On the complementary phenomenon, namely waking-up, there is an interesting study by M. Grotjahn, “Über Selbstbeobachtungen beim Erwachen,” Zeitschrift für die gesammte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, (139), 1932.
E. Trömner, “Vorgänge beim Einschlafen,” Jahrbuch für Psychologie und Neurologie, 17 (1911).
A. Angyal, “Der Schlummerzustand,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 103(1927).
Cf. also: K. Leonhard, Gesetze und Sinn des Träumens (Stuttgart: G. Thieme, 19512), pp. 99ff.
E. Cla-parède, “La question du sommeil,” Année psychologique, 18 (1912), pp. 456ff.
P. Schenk, “Ueber das Schlaf erleben,” Monatschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, 72(1929). The changes in consciousness during falling asleep are characterized by Sartre as transition to a “captive consciousness”.
J.-P. Sartre, L’imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 55ff.
E.B. Leroy, Les visions du demi-sommeil (Paris: Boivin, 19332).
Cf. for an excellent summary of the data. H. Ey, Études psychiatriques, vol. I (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948), pp. 167ff.
Angyal, op. cit., pp. 97–98.
A. Hoche, Das träumende Ich (Jena: G. Fischer, 1926).
A. Bizette, “Remarques sur les phases du présommeil,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 28 (1931).
Angyal, op. cit., pp. 67.
Cf. the development of this concept in S. Strasser, Het ziehbegrip in de metaphysische en de empirische psychologie (Leuven: Nauwelaarts, 1950), pp. 57ff.
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. CK. Scott Moncrieff (New York: The Modem Library, 1956), p. 4. Italics are ours.
We may place “the psychical night” as H. Beaunis has called drowsiness, opposite this falling-asleep of the world; cf. “La nuit psychique,” Congrès international de psychologie de Rome, 1905, p. 396.
J.H. van den Berg, “Menselijk lichaam, menselijke beweging,” in Nederlandsch Tijdschrift voor Psychologie, Nieuwe Reeks, 5 (1950), p. 296.
C. Schneider, Die Psychologie der Schizophrenen (Leipzig: Barth, 1930), pp. 12–20, p. 76, pp. 110ff.
W. Mayer-Grosz, “Einschlafdenken und Symptome der Bewusstseinsstörung,” Archiv für Psychiatrie, 78(1926)
Pathologie der Wahrnehmung, II, in Bumke’s Handbuch der Geisteskrankheiten, vol. I (Berlin: Springer, 1928), pp. 433–438
“Zur Struktur des Einschlaferlebens,” Archiv für Psychiatrie, 86 (1929).
H. Ey, (op. cit., p. 172) writes the following: “The marginal phases of sleep are intensely affective. Through its contents the fascination of consciousness joins the world of images to the sollicitations of the instinct. This marvelous flowering-time produces a kind of Nirvana-state, the bewitching fiction of a foreshadowed dream from which one has not yet completely detached himself; the attraction of the world of images has us still in its spell and the one who falls asleep feels ‘entranced’ by the world of dreams.”
J. Van Beverwijck, Schat der Ongesondheydt, ofte Genees-konste van de siechten (Dordrecht: Gorissz., 1651), p. 141.
R. Descartes, Traité de l’homme. Oeuvres, ed. Ch. Adan et P. Tannery, vol. XI (Paris: L. Cerf, 1919), p. 197.
Cf. also in vol. IV (Paris, 1901), p. 192, in the letter “Au Marquis de Newcastle”.
K. Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (Berlin: Springer, 19485), p. 196. Italics are ours.
F. Bremer, “Cerveau ‘isolé’ et physiologie du sommeil,” Comptes rendus de la Société de biologie, 118 (1935).
F.J.J. Buytendijk, “Le repos et le sommeil,” Traité de psychologie comparée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952).
Buytendijk, op. cit.
W. James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. I (London: Longmans, 1890), p. 213.
E. Cramaussel has collected a treasure of data concerning the sleep of the young child: “Le sommeil d’un petit enfant,” Archives de psychologie, 10–11(1911) and 12(1912). Just as the mother while sleeping does not forget her child so the child while asleep is still “interested” in certain things. That is why the author says (1912, p. 183): “… that which gives evidence of an inner organization which is carried on, of a central work which forms and transforms itself, is the extraordinary importance which certain weak but suggestive excitations receive which do not wake the child up, but which are of interest to it in sleep as well as awake: the barely perceptible noise of a toy which it likes, the subdued voices of his brothers and sisters playing in the yard, the water one lets drip from a sponge. Whereas he remains closed in regard to excitations which otherwise are quite strong, he is always ready to prick up his ear for these and some of them leave a long echo in the child.” On the contrary there is the fact that the child instead of waking up falls into a deeper sleep in the event of some disturbing noises, such as talking near his bed.
Cf. Claparède, op. cit., p. 434 and also by the same author: “Le sommeil et la veille,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 26(1929), p. 449 “where the thesis is defended that sleep is thus always in a certain sense partial.”
K. Landauer comes to the same conclusion: “Handlungen des Schlafenden,” Zeitschrift für die gesammte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 39 (1918), p. 333: “There are for each observer visible, meaningful activities of the sleeper.” What follows this statement, however, shows lack,of phenomenological insight: “The sleeper is not absolutely ‘stupefied’: he is able to act logically and with energy.”
Th. Ziehen, Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie (Jena: G. Fischer, 191410), pp. 397–398.
A. Gorter, “De oorzaak van den slaap,” Verslag der Koninklijke Akademie der Wetenschap-pen (Amsterdam, Wis.- en Natuurkundige Afdeling), XII/1, (1903), p. 151.
J.H. van den Berg, “Het gesprek en de bijzondere aard van het pastorale gesprek,” Theologie en Practijk, Nov. Dec, 1950, p. 164.
Concerning silence see Over zwijgen en verzwijgen (Utrecht: Kemink, 1949), by the same author.
Buytendijk, op. cit.
E. Heuss, “Zur Metaphysik des Lichtes,” Neue psychologische Studien, 6(1930), p. 261. Italics are ours.
R. Bossard, Psychologie des Traumbewusstseins (Zürich: Rascher, 1951), p. 77.
E. Hering, In L. Hermann’s Handbuch der Physiologie, III/1, (Leipzig: Barth, 1880), p. 573.
Proust, op. cit., p. 3.
Quoted by G. Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves (Paris: Corti, 1947), p. 140.
R.M. Rilke, Das Buch der Bilder (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1922), p. 55.
Rilke, op. cit., p. 157.
Quoted by O.P. Bollnow, Rilke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1951), p. 54. Cf. chapter 8 of this work concerning the meaning of the night in Rilke’s work.
G. Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris: Corti, 1948), p. 114.
Ibid., p. 98.
Ch. Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: La Girouette, 1948), vol. I, p. 45.
Baudelaire, op. cit., p. 90.
Ibid., p. 245.
J.P. Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Editions du Point du jour, 1947), p. 126.
Baudelaire, op. cit., p. 472.
Quoted by W.J. Revers, Die Psychologie der Langeweile (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1949), p. 21.
H.F. Amiel, Fragments d’un journal intime, I, (Geneva: Georg and Company, 1919), p. 168. On p. 81 Amiel speaks of “our consciousness which immerses itself in the shade in order to take a rest from its thought.”
H. Bergson, “La rêve,” L’Énergie spirituelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 194952), pp. 103–104.
J.E. Erdmann, Psychologische Briefe (Leipzig: Geibel, 1882), p. 116.
L. Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, III/i (Leipzig: Barth, 1932), p. 807.
Cf. M. Palagyi, Naturphilosophische Vorlesungen (Leipzig: Barth, 19242), p. 218.
L. Klages, Mensch und Erde (Jena: Diederichs, 19375), p. 52. See also what Rilke (op. cit., p. 33) says about the man who is awakened by light: “People are fearfully disfigured by the light that drips from their countenances, and if at night they have foregathered, you look on a wavering world all heaped together.”
(English: Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1938), p. 63).
Cf. the characterization by H. Ey, (op. cit., p. 168f.), which we feel compelled to quote in extensor: “One could not better express that what characterizes ‘hypnagogic consciousness’ is the fact that it constitutes a metamorphosis of consciousness which becomes ‘consciousness-which-makes-vivid’ (conscience imageante). What circulates in its movement is not an idea; what organizes it is not an effort; what animates it is not a will. It is concrete, passive, and automatic as if it were stripped of that which in a wakeful state reflection, constraint, and perspective introduce to its structure. It traps itself and flows back toward the spectacle which it produces in and through its own movement. Completely fascinated by the imagery it brings forth and in the magical coalescence undoubled from what it is and what it does, it breaks its totality into fragments which are alien to its spontaneity. In this way nothing is born in this consciousness which does not shine as an image. But this overthrow of the world which stays at a distance from me, for which my being, seen and felt on the screen of the imaginary substitutes itself, does not go so far as to abolish all consciousness of the game to which I surrender myself. The miracle which takes place remains fragile and within my reach. I experience that the marvelous event comes forth from me, and if I give way to it then this is with the vague feeling that it takes the form of my desire to dream.” (Italics are ours.)
Chr. Sigwart, “Der Begriff des Wollens und sein Verhältnis zum Begriff der Ursache,” Kleine Schriften, 2e Reihe, (Freiburg im Breisgau: Mohr, 18892), p. 118.
N. Ach, Ueber den Willensakt und das Temperament (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1910), pp. 240ff.
Jaspers, op. cit., p. 197.
F. Nietzsche, A Iso sprach Zarathustra, Werke, Band 7 (Leipzig: Kroner, 1964), p. 215.
There is a passage in R.M. Rilke (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, Ausgewählte Werke, vol. II (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1950), p. 128) which seems to contradict this. He writes that Abelone “at that time was able to fall asleep without growing heavy. The expression ‘falling asleep’ is by no means appropriate to this season of her young maidenhood. Sleep was something that ascended with you, and from time to time your eyes were open and you lay on a new surface, not yet by any means the highest. And then you were up before dawn; even in winter, when the others came in sleepy and late to the late breakfast.” This ecstatic puberty experience is certainly not a falling asleep, but a genuine ekstasis and rapture. The body loses its weight not through a weakening of the grasp, but through “sublimation.” Here the issue is more about a living passing-away than about falling asleep.
(English: The Journal of my other Self trans. M.D. Herter Norton and John Linton (New York: Norton and Company, 1930), p. 140.)
Claparède strikingly speaks of a “slipping into sleep” (glissement dans le sommeil), “Le sommeil et la veille,” p. 444.
Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 401 (English: p. 287). See for the meaning of noontide in Nietzsche: O.F. Bollnow, Das Wesen der Stimmungen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 19432), pp. 195ff. Amiel compares the noontide-mood explicitly with the night (op. cit., p. 167): “Noontide; profound peace, silence of the mountains notwithstanding a full house and a village close-by. One hears only the sound of the fly which hums. This calmness is striking. The middle of the day resembles the middle of the night. Life appears suspended although it is most intense.”
Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 402 (English: p. 288).
Ibid., p. 403, (English: pp. 288–289).
Cf. E. Minkowski, Le temps vécu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1933), pp. 79ff.
M. De Montaigne, Essais, I (Paris: Gamier, 1872), p. 288.
Jean Paul, “Die Kunst einzuschlafen,” Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 52 (Berlin: Reimer, 1828). 66.
Ibid., p. 83.
Revers, op. cit., pp. 60–61. See for the opposition between the slow form of temporalization of boredom and the rapid temporalization of sleeping L. Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins (Zürich: Niehans, 1942), p. 474: “In contradistinction to boredom (Langeweile) one can determine it (although perhaps not as pastime (Kurzweil),) then certainly as a short while (Kurzeweile). Whereas there time appears to us as ‘infinitely long’, here it is ‘infinitely short’; it seems as if between the moment of falling asleep and that of waking up, regardless of whether the sleep lasted five minutes or five hours, ‘no time’ at all has flown. This can mean only that the dreamless sleep… is an extremely ‘rapid’ way of temporalization.”
L. Klages, Vom Wesen des Rhythmus (Munich: Barth, 1955), p. 44.
Rilke testifies to this function of the mother who brings peace and security in an unsurpassable manner: “O empty night! O dim out-looking window! O carefully closed doors! Customs of immemorial standing, adopted, accepted, never quite understood. O silence in the stair-well, silence in the adjoining rooms, silence high up on the ceiling! O mother, O you only one, who put aside all this silence, once in my childhood. Who took it upon yourself, saying: ‘Do not be afraid; it is I.’ Who had the courage in the dead of night to be yourself the silence for the terror-stricken child, the child perishing with fear! You strike a light, and the noise is really you. And you hold the light before you and say: ‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ And you put it down, slowly, and there is no doubt: it is you; you are the light around these familiar, intimate things, that are there without afterthought, good, simple, unambiguous. And when something stirs in the wall, or a step is heard on the floor, you only smile, smile, transparent against the light background, on that fear-stricken face that looks searchingly at you, as if you were one, and under seal of secrecy with every muffled sound, in concert and agreement with it.” (English: P. 71).
A. Vetter, Die Erlebnisbedeutung der Phantasie (Stuttgart: Klett, 1950), p. 118.
E. Straus, “Die aufrechte Haltung”, Monatschrifte für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, 117 (1949).
E. Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne (Berlin: Springer, 1935).
E. Jacobson, Progressive Relaxation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19382).
F.JJ. Buytendijk, Ueberden Schmerz (Bern: Huber, 1948), p. 58.
Kleitman, op. cit., p. 113.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 191. (English: pp. 163–164.)
A. Gide, Journal 1889–1939 (Paris: Édition de la Nouvelle revue française, 1948), p. 821.
Buytendijk, “Repos et sommeil.” See for sleep and relaxation De Vrouw (Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1951), pp. 232ff. by the same author.
I. Kant, Von der Macht des Gemüts (Berlin: Globus-Verlag), p. 66ff.
Cf. H. Lipps, “Die Haltung des Menschen,” Die menschliche Natur (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1941).
Also: J. Zutt, “Die innere Haltung,” Monatschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, 73(1929).
K. Rubin, “Die Nichtexistenz der Aufmerksamkeit,” Bericht des IX. Kongresses für experimentelle Psychologie, München, Jena, pp. 211–212.
Cf. for this problematic: B. Petermann, Das Gestaltproblem (Leizpig: Barth, 1931).
E. Minkowski, Vers une cosmologie (Paris: Aubier, 1936), p. 89.
Minkowski, op. cit., p. 94.
Th. Ribot, Les maladies de la volonté (Paris: Mean, 191629), p. 106.
Jacobson, op. cit., p. 297. Cf. also: Sartre, L’imaginare, p. 60.
Jacobson, op. cit., p. 111.
Jacobson, op. cit., p. 46.
Sartre, L’imaginare, p. 224.
Proust, op. cit., p. 9, (English: p. 3). Cf. E. Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Fontaine, 1947), p. 111: “In insomnia there is not my vigilance in regard to the night, but it is the night itself which watches. That stays awake. In this anonymous watchfulness in which I am completely exposed to being, all thoughts which fill my insomnia, are suspended to nothing.”
Proust, op. cit., pp. 13ff.
Cf. Briand, “Maladie et sommeil chez Proust,” Les Temps Modernes, 51(1950), p. 1179. This article was reprinted in Le secret de Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), pp. 18–52. Note what follows in the passage quoted: “His world, the only one in which he feels at home, in which he finds himself again and recognizes himself, that is the pure interiority, that is the not-formulated, immediate, intuitive and, as it were, unconscious apprehension of the ego by the ego. It is the sudden shock of life in its own source caused by this being which is born in it taken at the moment when this is being born in it, independently of every fact of consciousness which could not do anything but, by exteriorizing it, dissolve the one as well as the other, being and life.”
See for the “failure” which must assert itself with this: G. Gusdorf, La découverte de soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).
Proust, op. cit., p. 18.
Proust, op. cit., p. 33.
Cf. Proust, op. cit., p. 51 the description of the insomnia cult of Aunt Leonie who has lost her husband and therefore no longer “can” nor is allowed to sleep because of sorrow. “Unfortunately, having formed the habit of thinking aloud, she did not always take care to see that there was no one in the adjoining room, and I would often hear her saying to herself: ‘I must not forget that I never slept a wink’ — for ‘never sleeping a wink’ was her great claim to distinction, and one admitted and respected in our household vocabulary; in the morning Françoise would not ‘call’ her, but would simply ‘come to’ her: during the day when my Aunt wished to take a nap, we used to say just that she wished to ‘be quiet’ or to ‘rest’; and when in conversation she so far forgot herself as to say ‘what made me wake up’, or ‘I dreamed that’, she would flush and at once correct herself.” (English: pp. 70–71.)
Bergson (op. cit., p. 95) says: “… suppose that at a certain moment I wish to be disinterested in my present situation, the pressing action, and finally in what concentrates all the activities of memory on one single point. In other words, suppose that I fall asleep.” However, cf. Claparède, “La question du sommeil,” p. 434, concerning the relationship between sleep and the “law of interest”; also in “Le sommeil et la veille,” p. 448. Allers, too, relates (subjective) tiredness and disinterest on the one hand, to “the capacity for sleep” (Schlaffähigkeit) which is motivated by them: “When someone during some work or other suddenly loses his interest in it, for instance realizes that he cannot beat his competitor, then sometimes fatigue sets in suddenly… In fact there are attitudes which favor the occurrence of such experiences, as for instance lack of interest, the conviction that a work is difficult and impractical, inner rejection of this work, and so on.” Cf. R. Allers, “Ueber neurotische Schlafstörungen,” Deutsche me-dische Wochenschrift, 54 (1928), p. 817.
Jean Paul, op. cit., p. 84.
E.A. Poe, Eleonora, in The Complete Poems and Stories of E.A. Poe, vol. I, (New York: A Knopf, 1946), p. 375.
After completing this essay we found in the Husserl-Archives at Louvain the fragment Das bewusstlose Ich — Schlaf — Ohnmacht which we here publish in its entirety because of its agreement with our own analyses. The author thanks Professor Dr. H.L. Van Breda O.F.M. for his kind permission for publication. The fragment consists in an appendix of two typed pages (pp. 48–49) which refer to pp. 17ff. of the (transcribed and typed) ms. A. VI 14 which is entitled: Die phänomenologische Problematik von Geburt, Tod, Unbewusstsein zurückgeleitet zur allgemeinen Theorie der Inten-tionalität. — Weltbewusstsein und thematisches Bewusstsein. The ms. dates from the years 1930–1932. On pp. 10ff. of the main text Husserl discusses the problems of sleep and falling asleep in a broader context. That is why these pages, however interesting they may be, are not so suited for separate publication as the presently reproduced appendix which forms a complete whole.
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Linschoten, J. (1987). On Falling Asleep. In: Kockelmans, J.J. (eds) Phenomenological Psychology. Phaenomenologica, vol 103. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3589-1_5
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