Dancing with the Unconscious by Knafo Danielle

Author:Knafo, Danielle
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

DREAMS AND CREATIVITY

Dreams and their interpretation play a central role in the theories of Freud and Jung. For Freud the dream was the “royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (1900/1953b, p. 608). He insisted that dreams are not chance waste products of mental life but, rather, intelligible, even intellectual, human operations that have meaning and are capable of being interpreted. Freud believed dreams provide a persuasive challenge to the traditional supposition that psychic acts are primarily conscious. He understood dreams as the symbolic representation of the fulfillment of unconscious wishes, usually sexual and infantile in origin. He was interested in the dream's latent, unconscious content more than its manifest covering (1923/1961d), believing dreams to be disguised and therefore requiring decoding akin to cryptography (1911/1958a). Later (1920/1955), he added that some dreams express the unconscious attempt to master traumatic experiences. In all, Freud regarded dreams as involving a regression from motor to sensory channels of perception and to earlier (primary process) forms of thinking. In treatment, he believed dreams provide a perfect means to interest patients in the unconscious, to undo repressions, and to express transference aspects that are otherwise unverbalized (1900/1953b, 1923/1961d).

Like Freud, Jung considered the dream as a major avenue to gaining knowledge of the unconscious mind. Yet, unlike Freud, Jung did not believe dreams were deceptive but, rather, expressive and revealing. In his words, dreams are “impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche…[that] show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature” (1933/1964, p. 149). Jung thought dreams serve a compensatory function, regulating the self by bringing to the surface repressed, neglected, and unknown elements. He saw the dream as helping to access archetypal symbolism from the collective unconscious. Whereas Freud believed dreams inform us about our past, Jung believed dream symbols possess the value of a parable by teaching and anticipating future directions.

The theories of both Freud and Jung reveal the unconscious mind, as represented in the dream state, to be active and imaginative in organizing conscious experience. Furthermore, both men used their own dreams to aid them in their respective self-analyses. It is significant that both Freud and Jung considered the works that contained analyses of their own dreams to hold their major creative discoveries. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953b), Freud uses his dreams to both illustrate and give birth to his discoveries about the unconscious workings of the mind. Looking back at his accomplishments toward the end of his life, he claimed that his “dream book” was his most important work: “It contains, even according to my present-day judgment, the most valuable of all discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime”(p. xxxii).

Jung also went through a period, between 1914 and 1930 (see The Red Book, 2009), during which he wrote about and drew images from his dreams, which led to his discovery of archetypes belonging to the collective unconscious.

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