Clinical Psychologist …on Dreams Dr. Peter Demuth Clinical Psychologist & Jungian Analyst

Introduction Every interpretation is an hypothesis, an attempt to read an unknown text. ( Jung, CW, Vol. 16, para. 322)

Brief History of Famous Dreams

Pharaoh's Dream

Daniel Interpreting Nebagadona’s Dream

Other famous Dreams The Roman Emperor Caligula dreamed on the night prior to his assassination that he was standing before the thrown of Jupiter, the Chief of the Gods, who then kicked him back down to earth. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was inspired by a dream in which he was going down a mountainside picking up speed as he descended and watching the stars change as he approached the speed of light. Carl Jung dreamed that all of Europe was engulfed in a great flood and the water rose right up to the mountains in Switzerland. Hitler had a dream during WWI that caused him to wake up suddenly and to jump out of the trench he had been sleeping in just as a shell struck the trench and everyone else was killed.

Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his assassination and described the dream to his wife who warned him not to go to the theatre where he was fatally shot by JWB. Carl Perkins, in a dream, was waiting in line to get some food to eat with Johnny Cash when he heard a voice say “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”.

Freud and Jung

Freud’s Royal Road to the Unconscious: Purpose: Disguise and promotion of sleep

The reductive approach: The Freudian approach generally reduces the multiplicity of manifest-content images to signs pointing towards wish-fulfillment of repressed and traumatic libidinous conflicts. (In Whitmont & Perera, 2002, p. 6). In other words a reductive approach to dreams uses dream material as a way to hypothesize about infantile trauma or other troublesome developmental issues that have actually occurred.

Freud: “Everything in the unconscious must first be in sense” … thus dream imagery is a sign that points to something definite.

Jung’s difference with Freud… With Jung the dream image is a symbol. It is the best representation of something that exists, but remains unknown. The Jungian approach see the dream as “an allegoric and/or symbolic statement about the dreamer’s psychological situation, precise and objective, tailored for the consciousness of the dreamer and/or his or her analyst” (Whitmont and Perera, 2002, p. 7).

The Prospective Approach: The perspective approach to dreams holds out the possibility that the dream symbolism anticipates future developments, that is, it points to something in the future (not the past).

Some basic Jungian Concepts Complex Persona Shadow Ego

Collective Unconscious Personal Unconscious Anima / Animus Collective Unconscious

Ego-Self Axis (Consciousness /Unconsciousness) Common vs. the Sacred

Jung (1945) stated that dreams have access to “ all the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings which consciousness has not registered because of their feeble accentuation” (Par. 493).

Whitmont (1990): … in humans, present day events are constantly integrated into a body of experience, the unconscious, that transcends the individuals life span; thus the individual is affected by the cumulative history of life on earth while this accumulation of history is constantly augmented by individual experiences (pp. 1-15).

Jung states: “ A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood, it becomes a living experience”.

Some Rules of thumb viz. dreams The analyst who wishes to rule out conscious suggestion must consider every dream interpretation invalid until such time as a formula is found which wins the patient’s consent. (W&P, 2002, p.14). Inadequate interpretation by the therapist or understanding by the dreamer is likely to call forth repetitions of the same dream theme often with a more numerous, more drastic or more dramatic form. (W&P, 2002, p.14). The dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious. (CW, Vol. 8, para.505). The dream compensates or complements a deficiency of the dreamer’s conscious position; and/or the therapist’s position in regard to the dreamer or the analysis. (W&P. 2002, p.17). Since every dream tells a story or depicts a drama, no detail can be properly valued if it disregards this overall dramatic structure. W&P. 2002, p. 14).