The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams (12 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams
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is, in effect, the Mother of us all. Sometimes, an archetype is given a Latin or Greek name as an indication of its mythic quality. For example, Jung identified
anima
and
animus
as the feminine and masculine parts of the opposite sex, the
anima
being a man's feminine side, and the
animus
being a woman's masculine side. Jung believed it was important to look at those opposite sex parts of the self in order for the self to be integrated or in balance. Working with dream images of members of the opposite sex is one way to come to terms with the masculine and feminine parts of ourselves and others.
Another powerful archetypal image is the Shadow Figure, who represents the darker side of the self. This shadow character is generally the same sex as the dreamer, and may take the form of a thief, a murderer, or any threatening figure. According to Jung, this negative aspect of the self exists in every human being in some form or another; dreams are one way to achieve the necessary expression and acknowledgment of this dark side. Other archetypes of special significance in Jungian dream theory include Water, the Pyramid, and the Circle.
Jung believed that the dreamer could converse or "dialogue" with these aspects of the dream to discover hidden messages. This was the beginning of taking dream analysis outside the psychiatrist's office and into the dreamer's hands. Unfortunately, the complexity of the archetypal references Jung used made it difficult for the dreamer to work without professional guidance. It remained for other theorists, working in the second half of this century, to develop new methods of interpretation. Not all dream theorists today would agree with Jung that there is necessarily one big memory out there connecting us all, but they do remain interested in the research he did to further the knowledge of dream symbols and what they represent.
 
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Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 to a Swiss family with a long line of clergymen on both sides. However, Jung broke with this strong family tradition and decided to become a psychiatrist. He may have been influenced in this choice by his mother and maternal grandmother, who were purported to have psychic abilities. Jung joined the staff of the Burghölzi Asylum of the University of Zurich in 1900, working with Eugen Bleuler on groundbreaking research into mental illness, including the delineation of the term
complex
to explain a patient's peculiar response to various words caused by his or her repressed associations.
Shortly thereafter, Jung began an intensive relationship with Sigmund Freud and for a period of five years (19071912) was his closest collaborator. They had several disagreements, however, both personal and professional, culminating in Jung's publication of
The Psychology of the Unconscious
, which challenged many of Freud's ideas about sexuality and the unconscious. The two men also disagreed about the existence of psychic phenomena, in which Jung strongly believed and which Freud doubted. Though Jung had been elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Society and was considered to be Freud's successor, he ended his correspondence with Freud in 1913, breaking off from him in perhaps the same way he did from his own father, and resigned from the society in 1914. In his last letters to Freud, Jung complained about what he felt was Freud's patronizing and paternalistic attitude.
Jung went on to found his own brand of analytic psychology, based upon his interest in myths, legends, dreams,
 
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and symbols. He also developed the psychological distinction of two classes of peopleextroverted and introvertedand later described four functions of the mindthinking, feeling, sensations, and intuition. These distinctions are widely used today in many contemporary psychological techniques.
Jung wrote throughout his life on a variety of topics, including dreams, literature, and religion. Many of these writings appear in the twenty-volume
Collected Works of C. G. Jung
(1966 2nd ed.) and in
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
(1933). Also illuminating are his autobiographical book
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
(1962) and
Man and His Symbols
(1968), which was written for the general reader by Jung and his associates before his death.
Jung lived until the age of eighty-five in Zurich with his wife, Emma, who contributed greatly to his work.
Other Psychoanalytic or Neo-Freudian Theories of Dream Interpretation
Numerous other theories have surfaced since Freud and Jung, some of which are derived from their work, some of which run counter to it, and some of which reach back to the teachings and beliefs of earlier eras from late-twentieth-century perspectives.
One neo-Freudian dream theorist to base his work on Freud's ideas but ultimately break from them was Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler (18701937). Once president of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, Adler left that post to develop his own theories and techniques, which became known as "individual psychology." Adler is considered a forerunner of modern dream theory for several reasons. First, his belief that dreams are a problem-solving activity through which the brain sorts through
 
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experiences and attempts to make sense of them is similar to some scientists' hypothesis that dreams are a function of the brain and memory (a hypothesis that we discuss later in this chapter). Second, Adler observed that dreams can actually engender emotions that may find their way into waking life, sometimes changing the way we think, feel, or act; in this way, dream experiences have an effect similar to that of waking experiences. "The dream is not a contradiction to waking life," Adler wrote. "It must always be in the same line as the movements and expressions of life."
For the most part, these concepts are in line with Freud's. In a departure from Freud, however, Adler focused not on the latent dream content Freud talked about, but on the manifest dream contentthe material on the surfaceto see how the dream reflects aspects of the dreamer's waking life. In another departure from the Freudian camp, Adler focused on the dream as a whole, more than on the individual images or symbols, concentrating on how the dream reflects the dreamer's basic lifestyle. For example, dreaming of a dead person, Adler would say, might indicate unresolved feelings about that person that are "deadening" the dreamer's current life and need to be reexamined and then "buried."
Another member of Freud's original psychoanalytic organization who eventually left the group was Wilhelm Stekel (18661940). Like Jung, Stekel was more interested in the universal aspects of good and evil expressed in dreams than in the individual meanings or experiences that Freud emphasized. Like Adler, Stekel would concentrate on the overall theme of a dream or series of dreams rather than particular symbols to interpret meaning. Stekel did share with Freud the belief that only a trained psychoanalyst could correctly interpret dreams. In fact, he went beyond Freud's method of using free association as a
 
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way of gaining interpretive evidence for a dream; rather, he believed that "a thoroughly adequate psychoanalyst should be so familiar with the language of the dream that he would be able to understand the meaning of any dream without the dreamer's associations." Stekel also was one of the first to write about telepathic dreams in his books
The Interpretation of Dreams
and
The Telepathic Dream
.
Interestingly, not every neo-Freudian theory of dreams goes against Freud's original ideas. Erik Erikson (19021994), a leader in the field of psychoanalysis and human development, put forward theories that are more an extension of Freud than a reaction against him. Still, he was an original thinker, and he advanced dream theory in a new direction. Like Adler, Erikson was most interested in the way the manifest dream content is connected with the dreamer's waking life. He spoke of dreams as "a reflection of the individual ego's peculiar time-space, the frame of reference for all its defenses, compromises, and achievements." In other words, the dream is a kind of bottom line of life's experiences, reducing them to their essence as they fit into the individual dreamer's own experience.
Erikson developed what he called an "Outline of Dream Analysis" for examining both the dream's manifest and latent content. In it, he included several detailed aspects of dream analysis later expanded on by other theorists. His model for looking at the "manifest configurations" includes the following aspects of the dream: verbal (word related), sensuous, spatial (space related), temporal (time related), somatic (physical), interpersonal, and affective (emotions related). The latent aspects shared some common denominators with Freud's analysis, such as wishes, drives, needs, denial, and so on. But he also added his own theory of ego identity, emphasizing the constructive aspects of dreams, much as Jung and Stekel had. In a chapter included
 
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in
Psychoanalytic Psychiatry and Psychology
, Erikson wrote: "Dreams . . . not only fulfill naked wishes of sexual license, of unlimited dominance and of unrestricted destructiveness; where they work they also lift the dreamer's isolation, appease his conscience, and preserve his identity, each in specific and constructive ways." In advancing his own ideas about dreaming and personality, Erikson also amplified Freud's beliefs that dreams reflect sexual and aggressive impulses, thereby further cementing Freud's construction of dream theory.
Two American Pioneers: Calvin Hall and Frederick Perls
Although Freudian theory provided a strong basis for dream analysis and research for many years, in time, theorists moved beyond the focus on dreams as solely expressions of repressed or disguised sexual and aggressive urges. Indeed, by the midtwentieth century, two American psychologists, working from two distinct perspectives, continued the trend that Jung had started in rejecting the disguise function of dreams Freud had theorized. In doing so, these two dream pioneers, Calvin Hall, an academic psychologist, and Frederick ("Fritz") Perls, an experiential psychotherapist, took dreams off the analyst's couch and into the easy chair of anyone interested in exploring them.
It was in the 1940s that Calvin Hall first questioned the psychoanalytic theories of dreams, saying that they were derived from a "biased sample" of subjects; that is, the dreams of patients who were undergoing treatment for mental disorders. In order to correct this bias, Hall set out to gather a sample of dreams from a "normal" population so as to find out what the "average' person dreams about. From his Institute of Dream Research in Santa Cruz, California, Hall collected and analyzed an astonishing ten
 
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thousand dreams from the general population. In doing so, he inaugurated a new direction in the study of dreams, now called "dream content analysis," the classification of dreams and what they tell us about different kinds of people. Hall published his findings in his book
The Meaning of Dreams
in 1953the same year, interestingly enough, as the publication of the discovery of the REM period of sleep.
Generally, Hall found that most of the things people dream about are common, everyday objects and settings, leading him to conclude that dreams are focused more on the present-day concerns of the dreamer than on repressed conflicts hidden in the latent content of the dream, as Freud had maintained. Rather, Hall believed that "there is no such thing as the latent content of a dream . . . [that] a dream is a manifest experience . . . that possesses great psychological significance and that the content analysis of reported dreams is an important tool in personality research." The language of reported dreams (dreams recounted without the accompanying associations), he surmised, is there "to convey meaning with precision and economy to garnish ideas with beauty and taste."
In analyzing the thousands of dreams he collected, Hall delineated five basic conceptions common to everyone's nightly adventures. Each dream, he found, has the potential to reveal the dreamer's conception of the self; of other people; of the world (through types of settings); of "impulses, prohibitions, and penalties" (the dreamer's idea of behavior and restraint); and finally, of problems and conflicts ("the basic predicaments of the dreamer" depicted symbolically through conflict and resolution).
Hall also outlined five central conflicts that appear in dreams. According to Robert Van de Castle, a psychologist and dream researcher who worked with Hall, these conflicts are as follows: the conceptual struggle of the self in relation to mother and

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