Dreams: Crucial Texts on the Meaning of Dreams: Begun 2009.04.27

C.G. Jung.
Dreams: Crucial Texts on the Meaning of Dreams by One of the Greatest Minds of our Time.
New York: MJF Books,
Two Lincoln Square
60 West 66th Street
New York, NY 10023.
ISBN: 1567311350.

Began April 27th, 2009

[YtbF]

Serendipitous find! Again, from Renaissance Books.

When I got it home and looked at it more closely, it looks like I have previously read all of these extracts from Jung's complete works.

But this is still a great find because I did not 'til now have all of them in my own library.

And, of course, re-reading Jung is always a good thing.

Curious that I seem to be on a bit of a Jung binge, right now.

Not sure why, but it is prompting me to attend my dreaming world. Again.

And, as always with Jung, lots of stuff to think about:

... understanding is not an exclusively intellectual process for, as experience shows, a man may be influenced, and indeed convinced in the most effective way, by innumerable things of which he has no intellectual understanding (p30; CW8 par468).

And:

... as to the classification of dreams, I would not put too high a value either on the practical or on the theoretical importance of this question. I investigate yearly some fifteen hundred to two thousand dreams, an on the basis of this experience I can assert that typical dreams do actually exist. But they are not very frequent, and from the final point of view they lose much of the importance which the causal standpoint attaches to them on account of the fixed significance of symbols. It seems to me that the typical motifs in dreams are of much greater importance since they permit a comparison with the motifs of mythology. Many of those mythological motifs . .. are also found in dreams, often with precisely the same significance. Though I cannot enter into this question more fully here, I would like to emphasize that the comparison of typical dream-motifs with those of mythology suggests the idea — already put forward by Nietzsche — that dream-thinking should be regarded as a phylogenetically older mode of thought....

Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought.

...

Dreams, then, convey to us in figurative language — that is, in sensuous, concrete imagery — thoughts, judgments, views, directives, tendencies, which were unconscious either because of repression or though mere lack of realization. Precisely because they are contents of the unconscious, and the dream is a derivative of the unconscious processes, it contains a reflection of the unconscious contents. It is not a reflection of contents in general but only of certain contents, which are linked together associatively and are selected by the conscious situation of the moment. I regard this observation as a very important one in practice. If we want to interpret a dream correctly, we need a thorough knowledge of the conscious situation at that moment, because the dream contains its unconscious complement, that material which the conscious situation has constellated in the unconscious. Without this knowledge it is impossible to interpret a dream correctly, except by a lucky fluke ...(p33-35; CW8 par474-77).

And:

I believe it is true that all dreams are compensatory to the content of consciousness, but certainly not in all dreams is the compensatory function so clear as in this example. Though dreams contribute to the self-regulation of the psyche by automatically bringing up everything that is repressed or neglected or unknown, their compensatory significance is often not immediately apparent because we still have only a very incomplete knowledge of the nature and the needs of the human psyche. There are psychological compensations that seem to be very remote from the problem on hand. In these cases one must always remember that every man, in a sense, represents the whole of humanity and its history. What was possible in the history of mankind at large is also possible on a small scale in every individual. What mankind has needed may eventually be needed by the individual too. It is therefore not surprising that religious compensations play a great role in dreams. That this is increasingly so in our time is a natural consequence of the prevailing materialism of our outlook (p36; CW8 par483).

This paragraph has at least two very provocative,

to me, thoughts.

First:

The idea that the religious nature of compensatory dreams is because of materialism has a correspondence in that that compensation is also being made manifest in the non-dream world through the ideological 'dream' world of religious fundamentalism. While this is not proof of Jung's argument, of course, it is curious that there has been a huge growth in religious fundamentalism at much the same rate as the ideology of material consumerism has grown globally.

Second:

Jung's comment that what is possible for the history of mankind is to a smaller scale possible for the individual is an incredibly bold statement because there can be no empirical proof of this!

This does not mean I believe this is untrue, because I haven't thought of this in the manner presented here. I have chosen to not dismiss this thought, though, simply because of a failure of empirical proof because such a failure is not a proof of something's nonexistence. But I need to think about this.