Every Dream Is a Discourse: Lacan, Jung, and the Linguistic Nature of Unconscious Dreamscapes (original) (raw)
Related papers
Towards a Theory of Dream Theories (with an Excursus on C.G. Jung)
In: Bernard Dieterle/Manfred Engel (Hg.), Theorizing the Dream/Savoirs et théories du rêve. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann (Cultural Dream Studies 2), 19-42, here 19-21, 2018
Though there have been many studies on individual dream theories, there is, to my best knowledge, still a lack of meta-reflections on the subject. This essay will try to fill this gap (1) by proposing that all cultural dreamwork is initiated by the skandalon of a two-world experience at the point of waking from a dream; (2) by outlining basic elements which most existing dream theories share, and which can be used to describe them; (3) by suggesting four basic types of dream theories which have played – and partly still play – an important role in the cultural history of the dream. I will close (4) with an excursus on the dream theory of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) as a case-study.
A Discovery of Meaning: The Case of C. G. Jung's House Dream
Jung's work is a serious attempt to engage psychology with `meaning', comparable with narrative psychology, though the two emerged in different cultural and historical settings. Whereas narrative psychologists typically study autobiographical stories, Jung studied images such as those appearing in dreams and myths. This study turns the question on Jung, examining a dream that he had regarded as the birth moment of his `collective unconscious' theory. The dream's contents vary when retold after many years in ways that mirror the interim development of his theory. Representations of the dream as a biographical event in others' writings reflect contrasting attitudes towards him. His use of the dream's image as heuristic in the dissemination of his theory is counterweighted by the dream's effect on him as a poetic image. The psychological function of the image for Jung is considered.
Jung, Florensky, and Dreams: Three Levels of Interpretationquadrant XXXXII Jung and Dreams
Despite plentiful well-known instances of dreaming and dream interpretation in Holy Scripture and especially in the lives of the saints, Orthodox Christianity maintains a cautious attitude towards dreams and the use of the imagination in general. One notable exception to this can be found in the thought of the "Russian Leonardo," Fr. Pavel Florensky. In what follows, I will very briefly sketch Florensky's evocative and brilliantly suggestive Orthodox thinking on dreams, of which a fuller description can be found in Iconostasis (e.g. Florensky, 2000), and contrast this way of thinking with the traditional Jungian approach. I will go on to outline my own way of working with patients' dreams, using case examples from one patient. It is my personal conviction that dream interpretation does not have to be exclusively psychological or exclusively spiritual, and that it can be constructively approached on a number of possible levels: here I shall discuss three, namely the psychodynamic, the transpersonal/symbolic, and the spiritual.
Revealing the Unconscious through Dreams in Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis
Postmodern Openings
In this text we aim to present the way Sigmund Freud discovered the universe of the unconscious and the significance of dream interpretation. For "the Father of psychoanalysis", the unconscious is not just a depository of some mental contents that belong to a subconscious , but a genuine reservoir of autonomous energies that have their own determinism, different from that of conscious. The Viennese psychoanalyst is the supporter of a determinism at the unconscious level, which is revealed by the mechanisms of the dream. For Freud, dreams are the royal path through which the unconscious emerges. Only in the dream conscious can look strictly passively at the way in which unconscious contents emerge in symbolic forms through all sorts of condensations and transfers of repressed drives. In the dream, the Ego becomes free and ready for the real meeting with the Self, that only he can recognize and understand in its most intimate sense. However, dreams, though ephemeral, represent extremely effective successes for everyday psychic life. In the end, I concluded that the dream contents can be properly comprehended only by the dreamer, and the psychoanalyst can help the dreamer only to recognize these subtle understandings of his own unconscious.
This paper provides one Jungian response to a question from a symposium on Citron's Dreams, Nightmares, and a Defense against Arguments from Evil: Is dream-suffering as significant as waking suffering? The response provided is affirmative. Dream-based insight and its accompanying suffering at least, if not more significant than waking suffering. This, on instrumental grounds, is because the dream based suffering – when understood – can produce (even empirical) learning that the conscious mind alone cannot. This reprises Henri Poincaré's point, but places it in an expanded Jungian context, which provides a religious and moral dimension or seriousness that Poincaré's approach omits.
International Journal of Dream Research, 2020
Our paper aimed at facilitating the understanding and handling of Freud’s dream theory. We are grateful for critical comments on our contribution by Volker Hartmann which prompt us to differentiate more explicitly between verbal and perceptual representations of the latent dream thought within Freud´s dream theory. We will thus integrate the differentiation between the following two concepts in our previous arguments: The unconscious formation of the preconscious and verbal latent dream thought: The dream work by the unconscious ego replaces the sleep-disturbing stimuli – demands upon the ego – by a harmless preconscious wish-fulfilment that still has a verbal form, called latent dream thought. This process is dominated by the different defense-mechanisms of the ego, including displacement, condensation, reversal to the contrary and symbolization. The transformation of the verbal dream-thought into a perception of things: Dream work continues by transforming – in a regressive cereb...
Freud, Bion and Kant: Epistemology and anthropology in The Interpretation of Dreams
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
This interdisciplinary article takes a philosophical approach to The Interpretation of Dreams, connecting Freud to one of the few philosophers with whom he sometimes identified-Immanuel Kant. It aims to show that Freud's theory of dreams has more in common with Bion's later thoughts on dreaming than is usually recognized. Distinguishing, via a discussion of Kant, between the conflicting 'epistemological' and 'anthropological' aspects of The Interpretation of Dreams, it shows that one specific contradiction in the bookconcerning the relation between dream-work and waking thoughtcan be understood in terms of the tension between these conflicting aspects. Freud reaches the explicit conclusion that the dream-work and waking thought differ from each other absolutely; but the implicit conclusion of The Interpretation of Dreams is quite the opposite. This article argues that the explicit conclusion is the result of the epistemological aspects of the book; the implicit conclusion, which brings Freud much closer to Bion, the result of the anthropological approach. Bringing philosophy and psychoanalysis together this paper thus argues for an interpretation of The Interpretation of Dreams that is in some ways at odds with the standard view of the book, while also suggesting that aspects of Kant's 'anthropological' works might legitimately be seen as a precursor of psychoanalysis.
Critical Quarterly, 2019
Are dreams a kind of poetry? This question is raised, although never definitively answered, by The Interpretation of Dreams. At times, Freud treats dreams not as symptoms to be unravelled, but as evocative, indeterminate, nocturnal compositions. Where dreams are handled as aesthetic objects rather than clinical problems, a different kind of analysis ensues, at odds with the book’s more dominant hermeneutic style. The resulting poetics of dreams suggests an alternate route from dream interpretation to literary criticism: an associative, rather than symptomatic, Freudian reading.