Dreams 2

Carl Jung and Erich Fromm

Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud and an important figure in psychology was President of the Psychoanalytic society, started by Freud. He disagreed with Freud concerning the emphasis on sexuality in dreams. Jung accepted that dreams could represent repressed sexual or hostile acts as Freud believed, but argued that it was not always true. Jung pointed out that during day we experience thousands of things we don’t consider at the time because we are occupied with the normal tasks of daily life. At night, when we are not occupied by more immediate tasks, dreams may consolidate events not attended to during the day.  Thus, responding to visual stimuli and physical experiences we ignore during day, dreams could be predictive – not prophetic, predictive - of future events.

One of his examples was of an influential business man who dreamed that he was driving a train through the mountains at ever increasing speeds, up and down and around curves until he went off the tracks and crashed. Some months later, the man’s business failed from too many speculative investments. Jung argued that the man recognized, in his dream, the recklessness of his business ventures, which he overlooked in the bustle of daily life, and that the dream predicted his business failure.       

Jung identified three different types of symbols in our dreams: archetypes, national symbols and individual symbols. Archetypes are international symbols, such as “mother” who is a loving and giving person in all societies. National symbols include objects such as the American flag or the English queen. Individual symbols are things we have experienced as individuals which come to hold meanings for us that are not common to many.

The only example of an individual symbol, for me, that I could recall involved the game of “hide and seek.” Everyone present at my talk agreed that the game represented a fun activity. Then I told of asking a friend, Sullivan, who was one of seven men from K Company able to walk off of Outpost Harry the morning after the first night of attacks on that hill, what his job had been. He replied, “machine gunner.” When I asked why he was alive, he replied, “My gun jammed so I played hide and seek all night.” I knew what he meant. In my squad, when we were sent out on a “fight” patrol it was common to be told, “We are playing hide and seek tonight.” It meant we would be hunting an enemy who would be hunting us. Patrols were exciting, but not pleasant.  Hide and seek has a different meaning for me than for most people.

Jung also said that only the dreamer can interpret his dream, but that he can be helped by analysis. However, if the dreamer disagrees with the analyst, the analyst is wrong. A nice example of this occurred during my talk. One lady asked about “nude” dreams. I replied that they were common among people, such as preachers and politicians, who exposed their own beliefs in talking to groups, in effect taking off their “clothes” before an audience. On the other hand, professors such as I, who taught classes in statistics and testing, do not expose themselves during their classes and rarely have such dreams. Another lady spoke up and said that she had dreams where she was nude and went to work, walked in and sat at her desk without any concern at all. She was never embarrassed by her nudity in her dream. After the lecture, she told me that she typically had these on nights when she hadn’t done laundry and didn’t have clean clothes for work the next day! Amateur analysts would have interpreted her dreams as typical dreams of exposing some secretive part of herself, instead it was a dream based on her individual knowledge that she didn’t have anything to wear to work the next day.

In understanding dreams, you must remember the language of dreams is not the language of our waking life. In waking life we think with words: at night we think in pictures. Thus in life we may call a person a pig, but in the dream we would see a pig: acting as the person does.

Erich Fromm discusses this in “The Forgotten Language.” He also points out that during the day, we obey the laws of time and space, but in dreams we don’t. During day, we can say, “I am like my father.” But we know we can’t BE our father: in a dream, we can. Similarly, during our waking life we know that if something happened last year, it cannot be happening now. But in a dream, it can be happening now. We can even split ourselves in two. I had a nice example of this given me by a senior student.

An attractive blond coed told me, in private, that she dreamed she was floating in the air and looked down upon herself having sex with a young man she was dating. We discussed this and she agreed that she disapproved of what she was doing. This ended a happy experience for one young man. A couple years later, crossing the floor during half time in a basketball game, she came running up to me and gave me a big hug, then turned and introduced me to her fiancé, a seminary student.  It is always nice to get a hug from an attractive young woman, but not in front of two thousand students, faculty and administrators in a school where you are a professor who is already distrusted by the administration.

Much of Fromm’s book, “The Forgotten Language” is devoted to the manner in which different civilizations and tribal groups have interpreted and responded to dreams. While interesting reading – to me – much of it is not directly relevant to dream interpretation – at least as we now understand it.

More on dreams later.