As I was reading Jung, I realized one thing that I never realized while reading Freud. Dreams occur because the subconscious has something to say, usually about our subconscious desires (wishes). That's fairly simple. In addition, dreams have a "censor", that is, they hide information, especially drastic ones such as the need to kill someone, with symbols to make them seem less morally shocking to the dreamer. Okay, that's all right.
Jung says that dream analysis can be very shallow or very deep. The shallow kind goes along these lines: "someone dreams that he is walking down a street-suddenly a child crosses in front of him and is run by a car" and "he recognizes the street as one down which he had walked on the previous day. The child he recognizes as his brother's child...The car accident reminds him of an accident...which he had only read in a newspaper" (26). Obviously, some people are satisfied with that, some aren't. The deep kind is the kind that Jung and Freud always use, those lengthy analyses and they have a much more purposeful turnout.
So, the problem I've discovered concerns the lack of dream analysis; what happens if someone only analyzes shallowly (or in the worst case, does not analyze at all)? If dreams are supposed to send some sort of subconscious message to us that it expects us to take and use, why would our subconscious hide it under symbols? I'm quite aware of censorship, however, if we consider the layman, he would never know how to interpret his own dream and its content. Therefore, the dream just failed to inform us of whatever it had to inform us of. In short, dreams are technically psychic processes that fail their purpose when not given consideration, which happens quite often (after all, how many people have read Freud and Jung? Not many.).
In addition, dreams have probably been around since the beginning of man (or to be safe, circa 100 BCE [the Romans had a word for dream, "somnium", so I know they dreamt way back in 100 BCE]). However, psychology and certainly Freud did not exist back then. The ancients probably did not have the analytical knowledge and discoveries of Freud to understand their own dreams, so why would dreams occur in humans, when they natively do not have the ability to make sense of them? We are only able to do so now through modern, cognitive science. I suppose one could say nature was flawed in giving us dreams which we intrinsically cannot interpret.
Before I end...I'm a bit confused on the number of posts we're supposed to have. I've heard 17, and I have removed all posts that weren't really posts (i.e.: update posts), and I know I've skipped one week (this will make up for it) and according to the archive on the right, I will have only 16 after this one. I am positive I have posted every week (minus one for which this post makes up). Odd, isn't it?
1 comment:
I've been waiting for a post like this one for awhile. You have finally posted your own conclusions about dream analysis. In my opinion, both Freud and Jung went a little too far in studying dreams. A dream can mean anything to anyone, it all depends on the person's imagination and point of view. There is no such thing as a real meaning to dreams, since each person is different with different experiences can have different dreams meaning different things. I also thought it was great the fact that you brought up that dreams were around since the beginning of human kind. That is probably true and if dreams were supposed to have meanings they would be pointless before Freud and Jung. In believe that dreams are just like the screen saver on computers. It is a way for the mind to sort of turn off and relax.
And I too believe we need 16 posts and not 17.
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