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INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.
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Examines differing theories of Sigmund Freud & Carl Jung on the meaning and interpretation of dreams.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Examines differing theories of Sigmund Freud & Carl Jung on the meaning and interpretation of dreams. Overview of ttheir bodies of work. Freud's research on dreams & the role of the unconscious. His approach to understanding the human personality. Jung's research on dreams & his humanistic perspective of the human psyche. Theory of collective unconscious. How Freud and Jung's dream theories have held up.
Paper Introduction:
“Dreaming men are haunted men,” wrote Stephen St. Vincent Benet, and the two greatest classical theoreticians of psychoanalysis and the importance of dreams would have agreed with the poet. But Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung would have differed – and indeed in their lifetimes often did differ – on what it is that haunts us in our dreams. This paper examines the differences in Freud’s and Jung’s theories on the interpretation of dreams. Because their theories on the importance and meaning of dreams cannot be extricated from the rest of their work, a brief overview is first given of the context of the importance of dreams to each researcher. After providing this needed background, the paper focuses on their work on dreams and concludes with an examination of the implications of these differences.
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Jung's Research on Dreams The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung founded the analytical schoolof psychology by broadening Freud's psychoanalytical approach, interpretingmental and emotional disturbances as an attempt to find personal andspiritual wholeness. "Dreaming men are haunted men," wrote Stephen St. Both the mechanisms of resistance andrepression are in abeyance or at least substantially weakened during sleep,and experiences and feelings come to the fore in dreams that duringwakening hours are kept in check (Hogensuw, 1994, p. Vincent Benet, andthe two greatest classical theoreticians of psychoanalysis and theimportance of dreams would have agreed with the poet. But during the period from1895 to 19 , Freud began to develop many of the concepts that were laterincorporated into psychoanalytic practice and doctrine and have a bearingon his interpretation of dreams (Anserson, 1991, p. Many dreams collected in sleep laboratories are ratherordinary, but most people have at least some bizarre dreams. His perspective on the meaning and use of dreams - asis true generally of his work on the human psyche - is more humanistic thanFreud's, painting a picture of our inner lives that is more optimistic. Inthis essential treatise Freud analyzed many of his own dreams recorded inthe 3-year period of his self-analysis, begun in 1897. In his clinical observations Freud found evidence for the mentalmechanisms of repression and resistance. Hogensuw, G. Because their theories on the importance and meaning of dreamscannot be extricated from the rest of their work, a brief overview is firstgiven of the context of the importance of dreams to each researcher. A considerable amount of emotionis commonly present - usually a single, stark emotion such as fear, anger,or joy rather than the modulated emotions that occur in the waking state.Most dreams are in the form of interrupted stories, made up partly ofmemories, with frequent shifts of scene (Hogensuw, 1994, p. Starting with the work of the American sleepresearchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman in 1953, studies haveshown that a dream does not consist of fleeting imagery that occurs while aperson awakens from sleep, but instead that it takes place during abiological state of its own and about 25 percent of a sleeping person'stime is spent in dreaming (Hogusaw, 1994, p. Such stimuli as sounds and touches impinging on a dreamer can beincorporated into a dream and so dreams do not "protect" sleep in the waythat Freud suggested. The medical worldstill regarded his work with hostility, and his next writings, ThePsychopathology of Everyday Life (19 4) and Three Contributions to theSexual Theory (19 5), only increased this antagonism. 141). In 1921 he published a major work, Psychological Types (in which hedealt with the relationship between the conscious and unconscious andproposed the now well-known personality types, extrovert and introvert. Frey-Roth, L. Freud or Jung. Sometimes the pathways of thesetransferences can be traced through a person's dreams. Freud traced the operation of unconscious processes, using the freeassociations of the patient to guide him in the interpretation of dreamsand slips of speech, and from this point on in both his practice and histheoretical writings dreams would play an important part in Freud'sconception of the ways in which the human psyche works (Hogensuw, 1994, p.1 3). Three worlds of theory: An existential-phenomenological study of the therapies of Freud, Jung and Rogers. 98). And so whileJung's personal unconscious resembled Freud's unconscious in nearly everyparticular, the fact that Jung saw this as only one of the forms ofunconsciousness drove a substantial wedge between his own work and that ofFreud. This broad characterization includes a great variety of dreamexperiences. Do theirconceptions of dreams hold up in the 21st century with what we now know ofthe biology of dreaming? These studies brought him international renown and led him to a closecollaboration with Freud. (1974). 181). Freud's Research on Dreams Freud's very earliest work (some of it almost entirely biological infocus in fact and with little bearing on psychoanalysis at all) is notparticularly relevant to his work on dreams. He described repression as adevice operating unconsciously to make the memory of painful or threateningevents inaccessible to the conscious mind. (1992). In 19 2 Freud was appointed a full professor at the University ofVienna, an honor granted not in recognition of his contributions but as aresult of the efforts of a highly influential patient. For Freud, they had explainedeverything (Hogensuw, 1994, p. (1991). After completing a body of work on the topic of hysteria andexperimenting with the use of hypnosis as a cathartic procedure, Freudbegan during this time to substitute the investigation of the patient'sspontaneous flow of thoughts, called free association, to reveal theunconscious mental processes at the root of the neurotic disturbance. Because they are createdin response to what can be seen as universal human experiences, they aresimilar across cultures and across histories, and they bind us one toanother. 125). Whereas Freud tended tosee the explanation for human behavior and thoughts (including dreams) asthe result of intrafamily dynamics based in both the biology of sex and theculture of gender roles, Jung tended to see dreams and other generalpatterns of human thought in terms of species-old experiences (Barton,1993, p. Freud proposed that a mental process quite different from that used inthe waking state dominates the dreaming mind. Conclusion Jung and Freud were both in their own ways very much a product of theculture and medical and biological beliefs of the 19th century, despite thefact that Jung would live to see Sputnik fly across the sky and Freud woulddie as Hitler's war machine was beginning its slaughter. 31). They express important wishes, fears, concerns,and worries of the dreamer; so undoubtedly the study and analysis of dreamscan sometimes be a useful procedure, revealing different aspects of aperson's mental functioning. 97). During the last 5 years of his life, Jung developed his theories,drawing on a wide knowledge of mythology and history. Althoughnever accorded full recognition during his lifetime, Freud is generallyacknowledged as one of the great creative minds of modern times. He described this "primaryprocess" as characterized by more primitive mechanisms, by rapid shifts inenergy and emotions, and by a good deal of sexual and aggressive contentderived from childhood. Chicago:University of Chicago. Resistance he defined as theunconscious defense against awareness of repressed experiences in order toavoid the resulting anxiety. But Jungbegan with the individual and then looked beyond, all the way back to thebeginning of human history (Barton, 1993, 127). 132). (1993). Afterproviding this needed background, the paper focuses on their work on dreamsand concludes with an examination of the implications of these differences. 193). A. Aftergraduating in medicine in 19 2 from the universities of Basel and Zürich,with a wide background in biology, zoology, paleontology, and archaeology,he began his work on word association, in which a patient's responses tostimulus words revealed what Jung called "complexes" - a term that hassince become universal both within the world of psychoanalysis andthroughout the general culture (Barton, 1993, p. For Jung, personal experiences could explain a small part of one'sunconscious feelings, including one's dreams. Biologists and psychologists now believe that dreaming, as a form ofmental activity different from waking thought is more perceptual thanconceptual: Things are seen and heard rather than being subjected tothought. One serves as a sort of decoding device for theother. Thus the dreams that come to usfrom our personal lives must be understand within the context of thearchetypes that come to us simply as a result of being human. 48). As a result Freudcontinued to work virtually alone in what he termed "splendid isolation."By 19 6, however, a small number of pupils and followers had gatheredaround Freud. Chicago: NorthwesternUniversity. New York: ChironPublishing. Neither he nor Jung (who was in any way lessconcerned about the biology of dreaming) understood the complexinteractions among brain chemistry, states of arousal, perceptions based onknowledge gained from the senses and memory (Hogensuw, 1994, p. From Freud to Jung: A comparativestudy of the psychology of the unconscious. This work expoundsall the fundamental concepts underlying psychoanalytic technique anddoctrine and its influence on all of his later work (as well as in much ofthe criticism leveled at him) is clear in the book. And yet this new knowledge of the biology of dreaming does not suggestthat dreams have no meaning. Freud created an entirely new approach to the understanding of humanpersonality by his demonstration of the existence and force of theunconscious. 189). Dreams are meaningful mental products, just asthoughts and daydreams are. These correspond to such experiences asconfronting death or choosing a mate and manifest themselves symbolicallyin religions, myths, fairy tales, and fantasies. Born in 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a Protestantclergyman, Jung developed during his lonely childhood an inclination fordreaming and fantasy that greatly influenced his adult work. References Anserson, J.W. 137). But Sigmund Freud andCarl Jung would have differed - and indeed in their lifetimes often diddiffer - on what it is that haunts us in our dreams. His workon the importance of dreams as maps to the unconscious is now such a widelyaccepted idea that it is hard for us to imagine the state of psychologybefore Freud, which is to say before we each knew that we had asubconscious that was constantly engaged in hiding things from us and thatwould only let the truth out in small bits like slips of the tongue or indreams, which are mostly forgotten in the light of day as mechanisms likerepression once again take hold, pushing the subconscious out of power(Kaufman, 1992, p. By understanding how the personal unconscious integrates withthe collective unconscious, Jung theorized, a patient can achieve a stateof individuation, or wholeness of self. New York: TransactionPress. 198). 27). Freud, Adler, and Jung. Neither formof unconsciousness (both of which manifest themselves in our dreams) can beunderstood on its own. Jung's struggle with Freud. "We are not hypocrites in our sleep," wrote the Victorian critic andauthor William Hazlitt, and his words like the theories of Freud and Jungon the proper interpretations of dreams still seem valid. In terms of the senses, visual experience is present in almost alldreams; auditory experience in 4 to 5 percent; and touch, taste, smell,and pain in a relatively small percentage. New York: Shambala Publishing. Buteven as he looked across the expanse of human culture to try to find whatideas we hold in common with our conspecifics, he also looked into himselfand his past, examining in detail the dreams and fantasies of his childhood(Hogensuw, 1994, p. The time of thepublication of this book may also be as something of a personal andprofessional calm-before-the-storm for Freud, whose works would becomeincreasingly controversial, losing him a number of supporters who had felthis work on dreams was both important and valid (Kaufman, 1992, p. Helater made a distinction between the personal unconscious, or the repressedfeelings and thoughts developed during an individual's life, and thecollective unconscious, or those inherited feelings, thoughts, and memoriesshared by all humanity. In key ways this distinction can be seen as both anextension of Freud's work and a refutation of it. Research in recent years has clarified many of these aspects ofdreaming, but what may be of greatest significance has been the discoveryof a biology of dreaming. (1994). After the onset of World War I Freud devoted little time to clinicalobservation and concentrated on the application of his theories to theinterpretation of religion, mythology, art, and literature. Dream analysis led Freud to his discoveries of infantile sexuality andof the so-called Oedipus complex, which constitutes the erotic attachmentof the child for the parent of the opposite sex, together with hostilefeelings toward the other parent. Freud's and Jung's ideas that dreams meansomething have certainly not been replaced by a better understanding of thebiochemistry of the human brain. This paper examinesthe differences in Freud's and Jung's theories on the interpretation ofdreams. He hadabandoned the study of dreams as a primary tool through which toinvestigate the power of the unconscious. In these years he also developed thetheory of transference, the process by which emotional attitudes,established originally toward parental figures in childhood, aretransferred in later life to others. They are a reminder of our common humanity, and it is throughthese universally common experiences that Jungian analysis seeks to work.Freud tended to focus on the particular, on how each person's individualfamily and unique experiences set him or her apart from all others andhelped to explain his or her own understanding of the meaning of life andthe content of his or her dreams and other unconscious basins. A good deal of hisattempts to understand the universal elements of dreams and of otheraspects of human thought and behavior (such as myths) were based on histravels to widely diverse cultures in New Mexico, India, and Kenya. Dreams do meansomething, even if only because after we have had them, after we haveawakened from them, we return to them and cast a net of significance overthem. With the publication of Psychology of theUnconscious in 1912, however, Jung declared his independence from Freud'snarrowly sexual interpretation of the libido by showing the close parallelsbetween ancient myths and psychotic fantasies and by explaining humanmotivation in terms of a larger creative energy. The personal unconsciouswas the be-all and the end-all of unconsciousness to Freud. In addition, he founded a new medical discipline andformulated basic therapeutic procedures that in modified form are appliedwidely in the present-day treatment of neuroses and psychoses. This, according to Jung, is made up of what he called"archetypes," or primordial images. Barton. What Jung added to Freud's theories about the meaning of theunconscious and the interpretation of dreams was the idea of the collectiveunconscious. Perhaps he believed that he hadalready gone as far as he could with the subject, perhaps he thought thatthe ideas he believed in so strongly and wished to see disseminated aswidely as possible would be more palatable in the realms of art and myth.He may have decided to wrap his ideas in sheep's clothing, at least in somemeasure (Frey-Rohn and Engree, 1974, p. Jung's therapeutic approach aimed at reconciling the diverse states ofpersonality, which he saw divided not only into the opposites of introvertand extrovert, but also into those of sensing and intuiting, and of feelingand thinking. Thiswork ran parallel to his research on dreams, which are a manifestation ofthe subconscious (Anserson, 1991, p. The end of this five-year period of work was marked by the appearanceof Freud's most important work, The Interpretation of Dreams (19 ). & Engreen, E. Kaufman, W.
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