Dreams, A Portal to the Source

Edward C. Whitmont, Sylvia Brinton Perera, Sylvia B. Perera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415064538
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135857271
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1991. An introductory guidebook to dream interpretation which will be of interest to analysts and therapists both in practice and training and to a wider readership interested in the origins and significance of dreams. This book should be of interest to dream psychology analysts, therapists, counsellors, and the general reader.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION TO CLINICAL DREAM INTERPRETATION

Every interpretation is an hypothesis, an attempt to read an unknown text. (Jung,Collected Works, 16, para. 322, hereinafter referred to as CW.)

One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play around with it.

(CW, 10, para. 320)

This book is intended as an introductory guidebook for psychoanalysts and therapists who seek to integrate a basic approach to dream interpretation into their clinical practice. It is a practical primer for the analyst-in-training, growing out of a need for such a handbook, perceived as we endeavored to teach dream interpretation at the C. G. Jung Institute in New York. Its aims are modest. It barely touches on the rich philosophical issues raised by dreaming and fantasy.¹ It does not deal with material on comparative approaches to dream interpretation as this craft is practiced among the different schools of modern western psychotherapy.² Nor does it deal with the research coming from the laboratories on the necessity and patterns of REM sleep.³

This experimental material supports Jung’s views that dreaming processes are undistorted and purposeful, having the goal of synthesizing experience⁴ into images in meaningful and creative ways. They enhance learning and assist in the completion of individual development.

Our approach, indeed, owes most to the seminal work of Carl G. Jung. His insights have been personally clarified and extended through years of clinical work and teaching by subsequent practitioners. For the most part, regrettably, this work has not been summarized and published.⁵ Many others, including writers of various ‘schools’ of psychology, colleagues, analysands, students, and friends, have contributed to our understanding as well. The bibliography gives only some idea of our debt. To all of them we are grateful.

The dream itself is a natural and necessary expression of the life force⁶ — one that manifests in sleeping consciousness and is sometimes remembered and recounted⁷ across the threshold of waking.⁸ Like a flower or a hurricane or a human gesture, its basic purpose is the manifestation and expression of this life force. It gives us images of energy, synthesizing past and present, personal and collective experiences.

With ‘interpretation’ we do not mean a mere translation of nightworld visions into dayworld consciousness. Not only is such tidy dualism an artifact in psychology as in physics, but we are coming increasingly to realize that it is not necessary. Just as REM processes serve to integrate complex information below the threshold of awareness, so dayworld consciousness is infused and structured by images which render it meaningful. Indeed, we are coming increasingly to realize that — although dreaming and the verbal telling of the dream are localized in different areas of the brain⁹ — ‘dreaming and waking partake of the same reality, which is both spiritual and physical.’¹⁰ Both states can be understood from a variety of perspectives, and both can be read metaphorically or symbolically.

The dream as a whole may have many human ‘uses.’ Like the water in a stream dipped up in cups and used for cooking or for quenching thirst, channeled in sluices and pipes and used for turning water mills or filling swimming pools and flushing toilets. It can be left alone in its streambed and looked at quietly, thereby ‘used’ for rest or boating, for contemplation, or for stimulating the reflective streams of art. So energy flowing into dream images can have many uses. Among them the dream can be used for providing access into unconscious areas of life, for providing specific and appropriately timed messages of many kinds which can assist the dreamer with problem solving,¹¹ artistic inspiration, psychological development, and spiritual deepening. As one commentator put it, ‘The superordinate function of dreams is the development, maintenance (regulation), and, when necessary, restoration of psychic processes, structures, and organization.’¹²

The dream can, thus, also be used for healing. As it holds up to consciousness metaphors and symbols of the unceasing energy flow, sustaining and shaping personal life, it shows the underlying patterns with which, for the sake of our health, we need to be in more conscious relationship. Equally, it shows also images of those mis-constellated patterns into which our personal lives are inevitably bent. The flowing interplay between these healing and ‘dis-eased’ patterns can provide inestimable guidance for the process of psychotherapy.

To the therapist, each dream reveals messages about psychic structures or complexes of the dreamer intrapsychically in past and present. It also conveys information about the dreamer’s relations to others on whom those structures and complexes are projected. Each dream tells the clinician about psychological dynamics, developmental patterns and capacities. It also images the dreamer’s relations to the spiritual dimension, to the Self and to archetypal patterns and energies. The dreamer and his or her therapist may seek to learn from all of these levels about hitherto unknown aspects of personal and transpersonal existence.

To approach dream interpretation adequately we need to find perspectives beyond those created by dualistic consciousness, which rests content with oppositions — exterior/interior, object/subject, day/night, life/death, functional-descriptive/imaginal, focused attention/openness, etc. While these opposites are valuable for defining rational awareness, we need also to develop an integrative consciousness¹³ that can read both daily and nightly actions and events and nightly and daily visions from many perspectives and to integrate these perspectives for ourselves and the patient-dreamer before us in our consulting rooms. This capacity relies on an ability to shift between the many forms of magic-affective, body, mythological, allegoric, symbolic, and rational awareness. By developing these modes, or particular styles of consciousness, it becomes possible to shift between them just as we seek to shift from one situationally relevant typological function to another. Thus we may gain the fullest possible range of perspectives on the psychological significance of a given situation — be it an event or a dream or a dream event.

To use a comparable but simplified analogy of the possibilities of this multifaceted approach from daily life, we can consider a red spot on a tree: it can be viewed as a physical object with a specific physical purpose (a road marker), as a focus of action or attention or emotion, as a spot in a visual pattern, as a metaphoric or symbolic message, as an instigator of memory images, as a revelation of properties of energy bound into its molecules, as the expression of somebody’s fantasy (a remnant of a picture somebody was trying to paint). It can even be perceived as a part of a color scheme among the forest greens. It can be functional in all these forms of awareness — and others. To investigate it properly, the investigator would need to be open to all of these possibilities and to discover which of them happen to be most applicable to the given situation.

To relate adequately to the dream, we need, then, the capacity to circumambulate it from many points of view. As Jung put it: ‘In order to do anything like justice to dreams, we need an interpretive equipment that must be laboriously fitted together from all branches of the human sciences.’¹⁴ And, we would add, from the arts and spiritual outlooks as well.

This book is an attempt to bring some of this rich diversity of approach — and the capacity to play back and forth among the approaches — to the attention of the therapist, who can then begin to use them for the sake of exploring the various levels and meanings of each dream.

We focus specifically on:

(1)	the symbolic and metaphoric/allegoric language of dream images;
(2)	dream imagery related to personal associative material, rational and collective explanatory material, and mythological amplificatory material;
(3)	various relations between the dream and the dreamer’s conscious positions;
(4)	the dream’s dramatic structure;
(5)	the dream’s depictions of the relations between healing archetypal image and personal experience;
(6)	body imagery in dreams; and
(7)	dream images of analyst and analysis as material revealing the transferential and countertransferential relationship.

All of these areas need to be held hovering in the therapist’s consciousness as clinical dream interpretative work proceeds. Indeed, this book could be read as a circle, each chapter providing a way station from which to focus on the dream, which lies at its center.

Chapter Two

WORKING WITH THE DREAM IN CLINICAL PRACTICE

The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them.

(CW, 10, para. 325)

The clinical understanding of dreams requires both art and skill. The art consists of an ability to sense the dream as a multifaceted dramatic presentation, as if one were allowed to witness a scene from the play of life. The performance would require attendance with full respect, empathy, sensitive intelligence, intuition, and a sense of symbolic expression. These artistic/spiritual capacities a therapist either possesses or does not. But if such gifts are at all present, they can be further developed with disciplined apprenticeship. A clinician may learn, as he or she studies the art, to enhance perception of the many facets and levels of the dream’s integrated dramatic structure, to determine its main theme and subtle variations, its perspective on the dreamer’s psychological reality, and to work with its symbolism, its significant foci and energy patterns, its qualities of emotional expressiveness. Enjoying poetry, fairy tales, literature, music, and the images of the visual arts is good training for the art of dream appreciation.

For such an artistic approach to dream interpretation relies on a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 INTRODUCTION TO CLINICAL DREAM INTERPRETATION
• 2 WORKING WITH THE DREAM IN CLINICAL PRACTICE
• 3 THE SITUATION AS IT IS
• 4 THE LANGUAGE OF DREAMS
• 5 ASSOCIATION, EXPLANATION, AMPLIFICATION: THE DREAM FIELD
• 6 COMPENSATION AND COMPLEMENTATION: OBJECT AND SUBJECT LEVELS
• 7 THE DRAMATIC STRUCTURE OF THE DREAM
• 8 MYTHOLOGICAL MOTIFS
• 9 TECHNICAL POINTS
• 10 PROGNOSIS FROM DREAMS
• 11 BODY IMAGERY
• 12 DREAMS OF THERAPY AND THE FIGURE OF THE THERAPIST
• 13 CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of dreams
• Index