Dream Analysis. C.G. Jung

Rating:
Summary: An important first-hand account
Review: ....was often at his best (and worst) in his seminars, some of which have now been translated into English. Jung often spoke directly out of his intuition and spiced what he said with numerous illustrations from case histories and his own special studies.

Rating:
Summary: spontaneous Jung....
Review: ....was often at his best (and worst) in his seminars, some of which have now been translated into English. Jung often spoke directly out of his intuition and spiced what he said with numerous illustrations from case histories and his own special studies.

Rating:
Summary: A few comments
Review: I just had a few comments on this book. I cover a lot of ground in this review, ranging from depth psychology to neurobiology, so I apologize in advance for that, but most of it is relevant to the discussion of dreams and the brain.

While I like Jung and am very familiar with his ideas, and notwithstanding the fact that he has faired better than Freud as far as his long-term reputation goes in recent decades (and he's certainly a better authority than most to cite here), he still has that fascination with dreams which he and many depth psychologists of the day inherited from the 19th century European mystical and early psychological tradition.

Unfortunately, in contrast to previous decades (especially the pre-60s era) where Freudian therapists were all the rage and were portrayed in films like Mirage (which starred Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman) and Psycho as heros engaged in life or death battles with the dark forces of the subconscious, psychotherapy and psychoanalytic theory has not faired that well scientifically in recent decades, and the obsession with dreams is another aspect of their focus which hasn't worked out very well, either.

So, while I certainly respect and admire many of the early psychologists, and they were great pioneers in many ways, and some of their ideas are still important, nevertheless, a lot of what they said has to be taken now with a considerable grain of salt. It doesn't mean that dreams are completely valueless, but they're of much less significance than has been claimed in the past.

However, the most serious critique of the psycholanalytic (and others) view of dreams comes from recent research into the brain and neurobiology. The problem is that dreams are really not what people think at all most of the time--which is some sort of cyptic but profound message from the unconscious mind.

For example, consider the question of why most dreams seem to consist of collections or sequences of difficult to interpret images, thoughts, and memories that seem to be combined or strung together in a not very logical and difficult to interpret fashion. The reason why, contrary to the popular belief that this reflects some profound and not easily discernible meaning, is that the order really is almost random, or is governed by very weak associational processes. The reason why this is, and why most dreams seem so puzzling and difficult to understand is that when you go to sleep, the memory areas of the brain located in the temporal cortex become more active through a process known as corticocipedal disinhibition, allowing memories, images, and thoughts to flood into consciousness willy-nilly. This is prevented or inhibited during normal waking, otherwise the flood of thoughts and images would interfere with normal memory retrieval and thinking processes.

This explanation wasn't understood until about 30 years ago and comes from important research into the neurobiology of dreaming and consciousness. Most people, though, still have these old, pre-scientific notions that they have some sort of profound significance. If you're under a lot of stress, such as on the job, or whatever, and you dream that your boss just fired you, okay, that's different. Obviously the dream has some relation to reality (which in this case shouldn't be that hard to figure out).

But most of the time the dream will be something like the following: boss calls you into his or her office and tells you to fly away with him in a great, golden chariot with six magical, flying, white horses on a secret mission into the future, or the past, or whatever. So you do. At that point you wake up and think to yourself, "What the hell did that mean? I don't know but it must be something very profound. It must mean my boss really likes me after all, and that I'm destined to do great things on the job since we flew off together into the sunset in this great chariot drawn by six flying, white horses."

Unfortunately, the simple fact is that the dream doesn't really mean anything. It means you had a dream that used as its point of departure your boss or job, since that's what's currently on your mind, but after that, the free-associational flow of dream images and thoughts took over and produced the usual semi-nonsensical concatenation of dream images and thoughts.

I realize this explanation won't appeal to many people, but as someone wiser than I once said, "God is a mathematician, and so the universe works according to physical and biological laws, rather than as mystics, poets, lovers, romantics, and New Agers (and adherents of other touch-feely philosophies and beliefs), would have liked."


Rating:
Summary: An important first-hand account
Review: If one has read some of Jung's scientific books, or any of his books, something in each is touched upon in the Dream Analysis seminars collected in this volume. Jung, over the course of about six months of weekly lectures, analyses the dreams of a male patient in his late forties. This in itself is a rarity because Jung did not discuss men's dreams as often as those of his women patients. It is difficult to avoid such words as "remarkable" or "astonishing" in describing what Jung does here. Jung purposely chooses "everyday" dreams and not "big archetypal" ones to analyse because, as he says, the everyday ones are more difficult to analyse and therefore the more analytically instructive. Jung's forays into mythology, anthropology, 'primitive' psychology, religion, and philosophy, as well as into his own psychological concepts of the psyche, are truly an experience to behold, if only after the fact in this transcript. The volume's editor quotes Jung as admitting that there were errors in some of Jung's extemporaneous expositions which should be, are are, clearly corrected. But these are few and do not take away from the whole, which is a "method" of dream analysis whose effect is little short of the realization before one's eyes of the whole psychic life of one man in all of its hidden nuances and overt terrors and where nothing less than the history of mankind and all that it has thought and felt over centuries and centuries is brought in as an aid in the explanation. One cannot help (especially if one is a man) to see oneself as the dreamer in many instances, making the book salutary beyond any self-help dream "cookbook". One gets a sense of Jung alive with his daemon standing there transfixed by his topic and simply pouring out what he knows to be true. A convincing, remarkable performance.