The psychoanalysis of dreams that came after
In 1912, Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, delivered a series of six lectures at Fordham University. Students surely knew—or were at least briefed by their professors—that Dr. Jung was the protégé of a certain Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis and father-figure to the man who lectured before them.
What they didn’t know was that this dynamic duo, almost always in ideological lockstep and seen as the two men guiding the bleeding edge of the budding field of psychoanalysis, was about to suffer a tremendous falling-out.
Jung saw the publishing of these lectures, The Symbols of Transformation, as the turning point in their relationship. Fordham University witnessed the breakup of Freud and Jung over differences that culminated in six lessons on Jung’s differing views on libido (Sharpe).
An oversimplification, to be sure. However, this turning point nevertheless marks the beginning of the ideological rift between the two theorists that would set them apart in their field for the rest of their careers. Though Jung would go on to publish much work on the field of analytical psychology, one battleground within the realm of psychoanalysis in which Jung and Freud would differ greatly is the meaning of dreams.
Dreams are a product of the unconscious mind—on that the two can agree. Freud introduced the idea that a role of the unconscious is to facilitate repression. The negation of base urges and desires seen as socially unacceptable or taboo uses the unconscious mind as a receptacle as the conscious mind saves face (Freud). Though Freud’s understanding of repressed urges is primarily sexual, this would be somewhat negated later by Jung, who generally prescribed to Freud’s sexual emphasis up until the falling-out.
Freud’s more developed understanding of the unconscious coincided with his theories on dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams. Understanding “dream content” as the manifest reality of a dream and “dream thought” as latent, underlying meaning supplied by the subconscious, the work sets out to explore the ways in which dreams may mean more than their often-nonsensical nature would suggest (Freud).
Through the act of condensation, Freud believes that the unconscious is able to package the dream thought and content into a single dream. The displacement of the dream describes the mismatch between dream thought and content—the repression Freud establishes makes clear messages of desire unable to be clearly expressed. For Freud, dreams are the workaround and dream analysis the decoder of these messages. The external aspects of a dream were Freud’s main focus—too much subjectivity would ruin one’s abilities to interpret the signs as they were relayed (Taveras).
Jung differs in his conception of dream analysis. Instead of the free association characteristic of Freudian dream analysis, Jung prefers to “stick as close as possible to the dream images.” Building off of the manifest content of dreams, Jungian dream analysis relies on a detailed analysis of the more literal implications of certain concepts in dreams, as opposed to looser methods of association (Jung). Freud’s assumptions of sticks in dreams would not sit all too well with Jung (Sharpe).
Jung’s notion of dreams includes, however, the act of amplification—the association of dream content with images from other sources. Drawing from popular culture and myth, for example, Jungian dream analysis looks to identify archetypal parallels through which the unconscious may very well be working as well (Taveras). This smacks of the loose, free-associative methods of Freudian psychoanalysis, but perhaps in this case with more emphasis on the internalized societal influences on the subject.
The act of dream analysis, as described by both Jung and Freud, attempts to distinguish the primary meaning behind what often amount to be discordant and nonsensical metaphors created by the subconscious as a response to a conscious unwillingness to simply express such primary meaning.
Where Freud believed these coded messages were the result of specifically sexual repression, Jung believed the dream served to work through issues that plagued the conscious mind and focused on the finer details of the dream content (Taveras). Disagreeing strongly with Freud on the proper way to extrapolate all aspects of a dream, Jung sought to analyze the subjective and objective content of the dream in the interest of observing how an individual might both knowingly and unknowingly affect their dream content.
The state of dream analysis in the field of psychoanalysis might have seen its rise in the duo of Freud and Jung, but the rift that formed between them served to demonstrate how differently dreams can be interpreted—and how some parts of the process remained the same. Perhaps it was better for the world that their relationship deteriorated, the final straw at our very own Fordham University.
Of all the hundreds of thousands of breakups that have occurred across campuses, it’s the best one I’ve heard of to date.
Works Cited
- Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Literary Theory: an Anthology, ed. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Wiley Blackwell, 2017, 575-591.
- Sharpe, Ella Freeman. Dream Analysis: A Practical Handbook for Psycho-Analysts. Maresfield Library, 1988, pp. 34-45.
- Jung, C. G., ed. Anthony Storr. The Essential Jung. Princeton Univ. Press, 1983.
- Taveras, Maria. “Jungian Dream Analysis.” Maria Taveras, Psychotherapist, jungiantherapy.com/jungian-dream-analysis/.