The Way of the Animal Powers (“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”)

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Chris

One of the main aims of these Mythfire posts is to suggest that much of what we think we know and believe to be true is connected not so much to “truth” and “knowledge” per se but rather to our ego’s need to protect and feel good about itself. However, once we see through ego defenses and suspend our automatic tendency to judge and critique we are forced to acknowledge a heretofore unacknowledged complexity, ambiguity, and richness regarding the human experience. More is unknown than known in terms of who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is ultimately a mystery. In fact, it is the Ultimate Mystery.

No matter how strong a grip the ego has on us this mystery nevertheless makes itself known in ways that can perhaps best be described as holy. Birth, sex, death, nature, love and laughter are a few of the ways something transcendent breaks through and becomes — at least for a moment — powerfully and undeniably immanent. These breakthroughs could be called “soul moments,” and, of course, another portal through which these mysterious moments are soulfully experienced  is art.

Take for instance Werner Herzog’s latest film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” While watching Herzog’s Wagnerian 3-D documentary film on thirty-two thousand year-old paintings discovered in France’s Chauvet caves in 1994, students of mythology might understandably think of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s writings on the cave paintings in Lascaux. Campbell, who passed away in 1989, would certainly have enjoyed and understood better than most the tremendous mystery on display in the Chauvet caves.

In fact, in this excerpt from his interview with Bill Moyers Campbell calls the caves in Lascaux (and by extension Chauvet) “temple caves”:

Campbell’s calling the caves “temples” brings to mind theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of the related word contemplation: “Con-templation means going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into the deep roots of things, into their creative ground.” [2] In this spirit, take a moment to click on and contemplate the four images accompanying this post, keeping in mind that they were painted between fifteen and thirty-two thousand years ago. According to Campbell, for humans living in the Paleolithic era when these paintings were composed, the “deep roots of things” or “creative ground” were closely entwined with the animals that populated the surroundings and offered up their lives to hunters as sustenance. Readers are directed to Campbell’s The Way of the Animal Powers in which he discusses in close succession the Lascaux cave paintings, the cult worship of cave bears, and Venus figures found during this era – all of which are also evident in Herzog’s film on the Chauvet cave.[3]

Or better yet just go see the film and in 3D if you can. That is the best way to get a sense of how the paintings and rock walls merge together to bring the animals to life. Mythfire recently attended a showing with Werner Herzog present for a post-screening Q & A. He closed the evening by stating that the main experience he had been trying to convey through his cinematic vision of the caves was one of “capital A, capital W, capital E.”

Joseph Campbell could not – and would not – have said it any better.

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Note: For more information on and images from the Chauvet cave paintings, go to: http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/francechauvet.htm. Also, Wikipedia has a page on the Chauvet cave, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave), as well as one listing other caves with cave paintings, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting).   Finally, a very impressive virtual tour of the Lascaux cave passage-ways and their paintings can be found online: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/en/02_01.xmlj. This last site requires a bit of time and patience to learn proper navigation but is certainly worth contemplating.

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Next Monday: Reverence for Life

[1] Campbell, Joseph with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. Ed. Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday, 1988: 80.

[2] Irwin, Alexander C. Eros Toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991: 93.

[3] Bear worship is discussed beginning on page 54 of The Way of the Animal Powers, Volume I in Campbell’s Historical Atlas of World Mythology. The section on “Temple Caves” and their paintings begins on page 58 and is followed by a section entitled “Symbols of the Female Power,” among which the Venus figures are the most prominent examples. Finally, this last section is followed by one on “The Shamans of the Caves,” which could no doubt provide insight into the painting of the buffalo-shaman that overshadows and even embraces the Venus of Chauvet.

Posted in Art/Creativity, Cinema, Depth Psychology, Myth | Leave a comment

The Royal Wedding (“Coniunctio & Wholeness”)

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Chris

One of the central concepts in analytical psychology is that of the coniunctio, a Latin term meaning conjunction or union. In essence the idea is this: instead of striving to achieve some elevated form of perfection, i.e. in our personality, profession, or relationships, our innermost need is actually one of wholeness.  We long to unite ourselves with that which is missing or “Other.” Only once this union is worked toward and achieved do we feel more complete, more whole and as a result live fuller more authentic lives.

In The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, authors Anne Baring and Jules Cashford give vivid examples of how this inner archetypal idea(l) of union was collectively imaged throughout much of history as a sacred marriage between a feminine goddess figure and her male lover or god consort. The authors write that this rite of sacred marriage was brought to life in a temple precinct every spring so that a feeling not only of union but re-birth or re-union was produced in participating spectators after a cold and lifeless winter.

In discussing the form this sacred marriage then took in Old Testament times, the authors write:

“The image of human union was anchored in the symbolic union of heaven and earth, celebrated annually in the temple precinct between the king and the high priestess, who personified the goddess. Even now, the resonance of this ceremony is apparent in the intense excitement generated by a royal marriage. The psyche appears to need a ‘sacred’ image of wholeness to preserve its balance, which depends upon its maintaining an equable and dynamic relationship between the feminine and masculine archetypes.”[1]

Turning to the present day, no doubt some people dismiss all the attention given to the recent British nuptials of Will and Kate as nothing but a fairy tale wedding watched by individuals who have nothing better to do with their time; this event is little more than a royal form of celebrity worship with its trappings of wealth, power, prestige, and so on. However, maybe the fact that millions, perhaps even billions, of spectators stopped what they were doing to watch the ceremony signifies a deeper psychological need at work, one similar to what has been discussed above. [2]

Relatedly, and to put in a good word for fairy tales, Baring and Cashford later note that tales such as Cinderella serve a very important and even timely function:

“What is the relevance of the story of Cinderella in the new age that is dawning? The image of the sacred marriage between nature and spirit, goddess and god, has been notably absent in the orthodox Judaeo-Christian tradition, and this has inflicted a deep wound on the soul, which has yet to be healed. The fairy-tale restores the image of union between the two primary archetypes and has, so to speak, ‘carried’ [the idea of union] for our culture until such time as the need for it could become conscious.”[3]

So, what are some of the opposing images and energies the recent fairy tale-like British royal wedding might be uniting and thereby “carrying” for today’s soul in the Western world? Look again at the above photo before considering the following list.

Assuredly, this list could be longer. It has been put together to hopefully facilitate a deeper appreciation for why an event like the royal wedding has such a powerful hold on our imagination. Perhaps many if not most spectators of these nuptials are unaware of either the underlying archetypal power of the opposites or the psyche’s related desire for an image of wholeness and balance. (This, of course, was one of the inspirations for the present post — to make this power and desire more conscious).

Finally, it seems important today to note that the psychological or symbolic understanding of ceremonies such as the sacred marriage is itself contrasted with a literal understanding of the same. In this latter way of seeing things, to the degree (if at all) Will and Kate are accepted as representations of masculine and feminine energies, sun and moon, ego and the unknown unconscious, logic and eros relatedness, head thinking and heart love, and so on, these opposites are nevertheless somehow inseparable from biology. Psychology is thus literally determined by one’s sex organs, and as a result no true coniunctio can occur between two individuals engaged in a same sex relationship. This is not the position taken by Mythfire in general or in this specific post. To be blunt: the energies included in the above box have time and again proven themselves to be independent of one’s sex. (A longer discussion of this topic might gently suggest that such a sex-centric viewpoint is not only more literal, less psychological but also not that dissimilar from the theological notion of idolatry; to the extent that we identify the concrete image or thing, i.e. a sexed male or female, with its powerful underlying energies and give preeminence to this image over these same energies, we have created a modern day version of the Biblical golden calf. The danger in the present case as in times past is, then, one of missing out on the truly sacred mysteries of love and life which the concrete figures merely represent.)

In short, it is most unfortunate that the discussion of marriage so often falls back on a literalism born of ego-based fears when a deeper and more sacred appreciation of the psyche or soul is available to us here and now. A more symbolic or psychological understanding of reality would reveal this truism: regardless of one’s sexual orientation only through an acceptance of and a union with what’s missing, i.e. the “Other,” is authentic wholeness attainable on the human plane.

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Addendum: Much more could be said in support of a symbolic rather than literalistic understanding of the royal marriage. For example, “right” and “left” were added to the above list of opposites when Mythfire realized that the bride with all of her symbolic traits traditionally stands to the left of the groom during the wedding ceremony as well as on other occasions. Also, in many countries the wedding ring is placed on the ring finger of the left hand which for millennia has been associated with the heart, feeling, and the sometimes dark and scary unknown, i.e. the contents of the unconscious. In other words, via the wedding ring, we see that the energies in the “right”column such as ego, logic, et cetera, must serve, honor, and relate meaningfully to those in the “left” if a true union or coniunctio is to occur.[4]

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Next Monday: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

[1]Baring, Anne and Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Viking, 1991: 479.

[2] Projected to draw two billion viewers worldwide, the ceremony was watched by at least twenty-four million people in the U.K., (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118036201?refCatId=4076&query=William+and+Kate+wedding), a number almost matched in the U.S. (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118036195?refCatId=14&query=William+and+Kate+wedding). For anyone who wishes to see (or relive) the highlights, one place to turn is here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/04/watch-royal-wedding.html. Or, if you really just want to see some of the fancy hats worn to the wedding, search no more: http://www.newnownext.com/2011/04/29/royal-wedding-pics-hats-silly-excessive-but-so-much-fun-to-watch-congrats-will-kate/.

[3] Ibid., 657. Also, to the degree that viewers have wondered what kind of offspring Will and Kate will have they may be giving voice to another archetypal notion: the coniunctio or union of opposites gives birth to a divine child, i.e. someone in whom the opposites function naturally, harmoniously, and creatively.

[4] While preparing this post, Mythfire inadvertently discovered another archetypal dynamic at work during the royal marriage: adulation. A footnote from Jung was discovered in some of his alchemical writings — which superficially have little to do with sacred marriage: “Adulatio [the Latin term for adulation] usually refers to the love-play of the royal marriage.” It is almost impossible to read this statement without thinking of the royal newlyweds kissing not once but twice – to the delight of spectators below. For the quote see CW 13: 441, fn. 12.

Posted in Culture, Depth Psychology, Fundamentalism/Literalism, Myth | Leave a comment

The Power of Synchronicity (“Mind-Releasing & Community-Building”)

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Chris

When Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung wrote his 1952 essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” he provided several examples of the experiences he called synchronicities. Sometimes also referred to as “meaningful coincidence” or “acausal parallelism” synchronicity generally involves three ingredients: a) an individual’s inner psychic state which is then unexpectedly mirrored by, b), an external physical event in such a way that, c), a numinous, i.e. spiritual or religious feeling is produced. In last week’s post, the inner psychic state took the form of a dream symbol which was mirrored by a matching tattoo in the external world. The dreamer’s incredulous reaction and instantaneous need to know more about the tattoo is typical of the numinosity created by synchronistic events.

One of the best known examples of synchronicity which Jung included in his essay and indeed which initially spurred him to the exploration of the phenomenon closely resembles last week’s example in that it, too, was preceded by a dream. (Generally speaking, dreams and synchronicities occur separately from one another with greater frequency than they do as a tandem experience.) Here is Jung’s description of what happened:

“My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably ‘geometrical’ idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself.”

Now that he has set the scene, Jung continues to the moment when everything changed.

“Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab – a costly piece of jewelry. While she was telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.’ This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”[1]

In short, the dream of the scarab was the inner psychic state which was in turn mirrored by an actual scarab flying into the room at just the right moment to effect a needed change in the patient. It may come as little surprise to readers that in Egyptian mythology the scarab was a symbol of rebirth. In Jung’s office the scarab once again served much the same function vis-à-vis his patient’s psychologically deadening “intellectual resistance.”

This last fact brings to mind another synchronicity-related observation from Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s most renowned colleagues, who commented on the “mind-releasing, community-building effect” synchronistic experiences invariably have on the people involved. The effect generated in last week’s synchronicity arguably leans more toward “community-building.” In contrast, this week’s scarab example suggests the “mind-releasing” possibilities of the phenomenon. [2]

Regardless of whether they foster “community-building,” “mind-releasing,” or a combination of the two, dreams and synchronicities are indeed powerful phenomena which potentially lead to psychological healing or rebirth if recognized, understood, and integrated by the individual dreamer or experiencer.

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Next Monday: “The Royal Wedding”

[1] CW 8: 982. Italics added.

[2] Franz, Marie-Louise von. Number and Time: Reflections Leading Toward a Unification of Depth Psychology and Physics. Trans. Andrea Dykes. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1974: 302. As a recent Mythfire post noted by way of an Albert Einstein quote, we so often give our intellect, or rationalistic faculty, a god-like preeminence. The above and earlier examples of dreams and synchronistic experiences, however, provide means by which the ego’s fearful and/or pathological grip on the psyche can be released.

 

Posted in Depth Psychology, Dreams, Synchronicity | Leave a comment

The Individual & Community (“The Interpretation of a Dream”)

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Chris

 

On the morning of September 13, 2005, Deborah Louis woke up in her Texas home dreaming of an image. She reached for her pen and jotted it down, later transferring it to her computer.  She also wrote down a somewhat peculiar phrase: “I envision a symbol before which I have never seen.  It is suspended in air.” She would additionally take note of the astrological position of the moon. The image to the left is what came to Deborah in her dream.

Thirteen days later Deborah left Texas for Carpinteria, California and the first session of graduate level classes at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Prior to the first class, one hundred or so students – some of them second and third year returnees – gathered in a room and listened as faculty members welcomed the students and introduced themselves to any newcomers. As is usual for the first day of class a mixture of emotions filled the room including curiosity, excitement, and even trepidation.

If Deborah was feeling any trepidation, however, something was about to happen which would ease it substantially if not altogether. The introductory meeting drew to a close and someone rising from his chair in front of Deborah caught her eye. Or, rather, it was some thing about that personthat caught her eye – for he had a tattoo just above his ankle that looked like the image on the right.

If in reading this description you have not experienced anything akin to surprise or amazement, pause a moment and see if you can’t recall a similar experience from your own life. Perhaps you woke up having had a strange dream that stayed with you a while. Or maybe you’ve experienced events, described in earlier posts as synchronicity, where an inner state of mind — say thinking about a friend — was almost simultaneously followed by a matching external event, i.e. that friend unexpectedly knocking on your door or calling you.  The classical understanding of such occurrences is that in order to be genuine there must be an accompanying energy or feeling that we might describe as uncanny, magical, or even spiritual. In fact, the term numinous is often used to describe such cases as it comes from the Latin word numen meaning the nodding of a divinity when giving a command or acknowledging assent. It is not too surprising, then, that in having numinous dreams and synchronistic experiences we invariably exclaim “Oh my God” or one of the several two word epithets beginning  “Holy _____!”

In the moment that Deborah and her dream image powerfully came face-to-face with me and my tattoo her “prophetic dream” became an experience of synchronicity.  It is very hard to reconcile such a dream – much less such a synchronistic experience – with the current “scientific” understanding of dreams as a means for the brain to mull over and work out recent events, express fight or flight fears and desires, or somehow strengthen its powers of memory, all of which were mentioned in last week’s post. No, something deeper must be at work.

There are multiple ways of working with dreams and synchronicities. Our initial inclination might be to seek a more spirit-oriented / intellectual explanation of how these things happen. A recent Mythfire post mentioned C.G. Jung’s notion of archetypes as “innate potential patterns” or “functional dispositions” which reside in the collective unconscious of all human beings. Though not mentioned above, once we know that “community” was the stated theme of the “Welcome to Pacifica / Meet the Teachers” session attended by Deborah and moreover that my tattoo is based on a sculpture entitled “Community,” it would seem that the archetypal idea of  “community” unconsciously innate within all of us was first constellated in Deborah’s dream and then again in the Pacifica classroom. That it took on the form in the dream of an abstract image Deborah had never seen before is not only amazing but is furthermore suggestive of the importance of art and artist in giving expression to archetypal, i.e. eternally vital yet often latent or unconscious ideas.

Whether on her own or with an analytical psychologist, there are a number of ways Deborah could work with both the dream and synchronistic experience that are more soul or feeling-oriented than the just mentioned head-centered explanation. Certainly with the image being an abstract one it is more difficult to find personal associations than if the dream image were a familiar person or animal. However, soul-searching questions remain: Why is the sculpture upside down? What does it mean when something is upside down, inverted, turned on its head? How does this feel? What does “community” mean to Deborah? What are her feelings toward this new group in which she finds herself? Might this be a type of initiatory experience for Deborah? Might this experience also be a numinous sign of affirmation as mentioned above? Perhaps this dream-synchronicity, then, is somehow confirming a move in the right direction for Deborah and her own process of growth or individuation. How then might she move further into this process? Finally, the most soulful activity for Deborah might be to simply stick with the image itself, to contemplate its eye looking out and engaging her own eye, and to see what feelings emerge out of this shared vision.

I would like to thank Deborah for permitting me to use her name and dream experience for this post. Anyone interested in seeing more original sculptures by Michigan sculptor Jim Cunningham will find them here: http://migcreations.com. Again, due to the abstract nature of his “Community” symbol and the fact that Deborah had never seen it before, this entire dream-synchronicity is proof positive of “the creative individual’s essential function for the community.” (Erich Neumann’s Art and the Creative Unconscious, p. 191).

 

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The original sculpture, pictured above, sits in Lansing, Michigan’s Fabulous Acres neighborhood where I served as an AmeriCorps worker from 1994-1995. A plaque at the sculpture’s base reads: “Community: This sculpture with five colorful interconnecting shapes symbolizes five ethnic groups of Fabulous Acres working together to create their community.”  Thanks must also go to my friend and former Fab Acres resident Connie Doyle who first put the “Community” tattoo idea in my head and then quickly proceeded to get one of her own.

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Next Monday: The Most Well-Known Example of Synchronicity in Analytical Psychology…

 

Posted in Art/Creativity, Depth Psychology, Dreams, Synchronicity | Leave a comment

The Interpretation of Dreams (“In the Aftermath of Tucson V”)

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Chris

“And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god…” [1]

Readers familiar with the phenomenon of dreams and dreaming may be forgiven if they immediately assume that this post’s title was inspired by Sigmund Freud’s trailblazing turn-of-the-twentieth-century’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Actually, one of the first and best known compilations of dreams and dream analysis predates Freud by almost two thousand years, and it, too, bears the title The Interpretation of Dreams (Greek: Oneirocritica). Clearly,dreaming and the study of dreams has a long and rich history – a fact also evident in the prominent place given dreams in humankind’s epic imagination from the first creative writings to the present day. (Perhaps From Gilgamesh to Inception would be an appropriate title for a book on dreams and our endless fascination with them.)

But how are dreams experienced and understood today?  It can be quite frustrating and disconcerting, to put it mildly, to read the often one-sided and facile dismissal of dreams by so-called present day dream researchers whose numbers include psychologists as well as neurobiologists. Here is a sampling of relatively recent articles on the subject:

  • A February 2006 Reader’s Digest cover story entitled “What Dreams Really Mean” uses technologically flavored lingo (“decoding the biology of how we manufacturedreams”; “upgrade your dreams”; “learning these techniques to control their dreams,” etc.) to reduce dreams’ significance to fears and desires which if recognized might help us become better attuned to (and able to “control”) our emotional lives. The distrust of emotions and the unknown which pervades this article can also be found in the following (mis-) statements: “Each person understands his or her dreams better than anyone else – including traditional psychoanalysts” and “There’s just no evidence of universal dream symbols. . . My advice is to throw away your dream dictionary if you really want to interpret your dreams.” (In fact, one of the general rules of thumb for dream analysis is that we are not the best interpreters of our own dreams because of our own predilection to read into them what we [read: “our intellects or egos”] want. For this reason we are generally advised to consult with someone else such as a therapist and/or a symbol dictionary as well as any personal associations we have regarding the images or symbols in our dreams.) [2]
  • Time magazine’s “While You Were Sleeping” from 2007 likens dreams and dream research to “bad odor,” “neural waste,” childish “delusions,” a “sideshow” and “side effect” of a highly evolved imagination. We are to learn to “manipulate dream content” and to “figure out what the rules are that the brain uses in selecting material for our dreams.”  This article makes clear that the only way to redeem dreams so that they are something more than odors, waste, delusions, etc., is to reduce them to the neurophysiology of the brain, the presumed originator of dreams.  Dreams, in other words, are nothing but biology and again little more than fight or flight responses. One Harvard researcher states that both dreams and sleep also serve to strengthen the brain’s powers of memory; even so, dreaming is not too essential an activity: “The brain is tuning your memory circuits as you sleep, and remembering [via dreams] the imagery created during this process may be fun, may be instructive, but is almost undoubtedly a freebie.” Needless to say, the appearance of presumptive “may be’s,” “probably’s”, and “undoubtedly’s” in this article is not exactly in keeping with the rigor normally required of science. [3]
  • The most recent article surveyed by Mythfire comes from the New York Times (2009) and, in contrast with the Reader’s Digest article, argues that not only are dreamers wrong to interpret their own dreams because they tend to be biased, selective, and “self-serving” in their dream interpretations but somehow dreams themselves by default must be mistrusted as little more than “indicators of people’s emotional state.” Perhaps this article’s most disconcerting aspect – in addition to its reductiveness and dismissiveness – is the underlying cynicism toward dreams evident throughout the article beginning with its title: “What Do Dreams Mean? Whatever Your Bias Says.” [4]

As with articles and scholarly papers, books which make dreams their subject matter generally focus either on their psychological or on their neurological aspects. British analytical psychologist Anthony Stevens argues that researchers relying exclusively on the latter, for example on electroencephalograms (EEGs) or other devices to study brain waves during REM sleep, “are like engineers who concern themselves with the technology of a television set while taking no interest in the programmes being transmitted.” [5] Instead, he insists that both psychological and neurological points of view must be integrated in any serious discussion of dreams and dreaming.

In fact, Stevens’ Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming is to be highly recommended as just such an accessible, thorough, and integrated overview of the subject. He has numerous chapters dedicated to the history and science of dreams and dreaming from ancient times to the present. Stevens weaves in actual dreams from famous historical figures as well as not-so-famous ones including himself – all of which serves to give the subject matter a certain organic richness and credibility. Toward this end, it may be advisable for readers to begin with Chapter 9 on remembering and working with their own dreams. Only if scientific or intellectual curiosity and rigor are joined with the psychological awareness, humility, and wonder that accompanies one’s own dreaming experience will a more balanced approach to working with dreams be possible. [6]

Mythfire confesses that this post was inspired in no small part over frustration at how one-sided and unpsychological today’s treatment of dreams so often is in both scientific studies and media reports. Similarly, the prior two posts in this “In the Aftermath of Tucson” series resulted from the fear that after the shootings in Tucson – and the importance dreams held for alleged shooter Jared Loughner – dreams might (once again) be viewed primarily as an indicator or premonition of madness/psychosis. There are undeniable parallels between dreams and mental illness, a fact which Stevens notes in Private Myths in a section devoted to this theme. However, what is so often overlooked or misunderstood is that dreams, neuroses, and even psychoses attempt to help individuals creatively and meaningfully adapt to life’s demands. One downside and potential danger with neuroses and psychoses is that they are an “inferior” form of adaptation which if untreated may harm not only the individual but others – as may have unfortunately and tragically been the case in Tucson. [7]

In short, the way to move from relative insanity to relative sanity is not to dismiss dreams as inconsequential “freebies,” to reduce them to only “fight or flight” mechanisms, or view them as mere indicators of mental illness. That present researchers so often seem to be (over-)reaching for explanations in their study of the phenomenon to the extent that they are uncharacteristically satisfied not only with ignoring the findings of their colleagues but furthermore with concluding with “may be’s” and “undoubtedly’s” suggests that there is an elephant in the room which no one wants to acknowledge.

That elephant, of course, is a psychological approach to dreams and dreaming that is worthy of the word’s etymological meaning: “the study of the soul.”  It is not only or merely the dreaming brain which seeks a meaningful creative adaptation to life’s circumstances but rather the dreaming soul. In Private Myths Stevens for one has acknowledged this elephant quite admirably at the same time that he has provided a thorough overview to what is a fascinating but admittedly complex topic.

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Next Monday: “The Interpretation of a Dream”

[1] Einstein, Albert. Albert Einstein: Out of My Later Years through His Own Words. New York: Citadel Press, 1956: 260.

[2] The article is on pages 93-99 of the issue which can be found here: http://fliiby.com/file/24912/n68clhsa0c.html. Click on “close to play” to access the issue.

[3] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1606872,00.html. An article published more recently in Time (“Why Dreams Mean Less Than We Think”) is even less rigorous and more dismissive in its view of dreams, as evident in statements such as this: “Human beings are irrational about dreams the same way they are irrational about a lot of things.” While possibly true, this statement tells us more about the shortcomings of people, i.e. dreamers, and almost nothing about the inherent meaning, value, or purpose of dreams themselves. See: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1881498,00.html.

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/science/10tier.html?_r=1.

[5] Stevens, Anthony. Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.

[6] Other recommended books for working with one’s dreams are Robert Bosnak’s A Little Course in Dreams, Robert Johnson’s Inner Work, and Stephen Aizenstat’s Dream Tending.

[7] See Private Myths, 167-170.

Posted in Depth Psychology, Dreams, Tucson, Violence | 1 Comment