Freud: Dreams as Wish Fulfilment
Freud firstly saw dreams as nocturnal manifestations in which the psyche revealed inhibited or unconscious impulses which could not be integrated into waking consciousness, usually as a consequence of moral coding enforced by the super ego. Secondly Freud held that the images we encounter in our dreams are a residual of the previous day’s occurrences. These nocturnal manifestations is in his opinion very complicated intellectual activity of a very personal nature. Therefore in order to discover the unconscious wish, usually constellated within the psychosexual sphere of development, he would carefully and quite methodically scrutinise and dissect the dream’s manifest contents. In so doing Freud could reconstitute the dream images to reveal its latent content and discover the hidden thoughts, feelings and desires which the ego couldn’t integrate.
Broadly speaking, it was Freud’s opinion that dreams pointed towards psychological trauma. And by applying free association he could unpack that trauma, bringing it into consciousness and possible ego reintegration.
Jung: Symbols of Compensation
It was actually Freuds work with dreams that sparked Jung’s interest and it turns out to be a dream which planted the seed of estrangement between the two men. In 1909 during a joint visit to Clark University in Massachusetts USA, Jung told Freud about a dream he had in which he found himself in a house. Each floor of the house seemed to be of a different era, and as Jung descended down through the house each level appeared to be of an earlier and earlier era. In the dream it seemed to Jung that he was going backwards in time until finally descending from a Roman basement he found himself in a neolithic cave cut from the rock face. Here Jung found stone tools and broken pottery including two half disintegrated skulls. Freud’s interpretation was fixated on those two skulls, explaining that he felt Jung must have a secret death-wish to which he was unconscious. Moreover Freud seemed to have become immediately convinced that Jung’s death-wish was directed at Freud himself! Jung obviously thought this was utter nonsense, but not to further upset the old man, volunteered that perhaps it was the skulls of his wife and mother-in-law, admitting to himself that after all he needed someone credible to implicate. Because of this event and a few other’s in which Freud seemed stumped when presented with mythological dream material, Jung realised that Freud’s theory on dreams was way too narrow and restricting.
Due to Jung’s work with the Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich, he came to realise that dreams are symbolic by nature and the they communicate in metaphorical imagistic language, a latency, he believed of early cognitive development. Because of these insights and the above mentioned Jung soon diverged from Freuds method of dream interpretation. Jung rather believed that dreams commented on what the complex was doing within the psyche, and in addition that a dream could actually move and influence the psyche towards a future position of integration and homeostasis. In this respect Jung’s principal perspective views dreams as compensatory in nature. In other words, dreams could compensate or provide a counter balance for the conscious position of the ego. For example if a person’s ego was too inflated a dream could symbolise any manner of deflation which would act like a counter balance, often bringing more of the unconscious into the light of consciousness.
Thus far have Freud with dreams as unconscious wish fulfilments pointing towards unprocessed psycho sexual trauma, and Jung positing that dreams are highly charged mythological images predominantly aimed at instituting balance to the psyche.
James Hillman: Its all Soul-Making!
James Hillman Jungian analyst and cofounder of Archetypal Psychology forms the next part of our puzzle. Arguably Hillman’s primary inquiry was focused on alchemy. This meant that his principal operation for dealing with the psyche was phenomenological - the study of direct experience. In terms of dream work Hillman was concerned with the experience of dream images, additionally this meant that he payed close attention to how they directly interrelate not only to the dreamer but also towards each other. Hillman is infamous for reiterating “Stick to the image”! In sticking to the image Hillman doesn’t concern himself with symbology, mythology, complex projections or latent neurosis, instead he believed that by studying the immediate context of the dream, and its specific detail they could comment on, or even reveal the subtle nuances of the psyche. In Hillman the combination of Alchemy, Phenomenology and Archetypal psychology merged into what he considered to be the purpose of life, namely soul making.
Robert Bosnak: Dream Synthesis
And so finally, and quite reductively we come to Embodied Imagination founded by Robert Bosnak, student of both Jung, Hillman and a very important Islamic scholar by the name of Henry Corbin. Embodied Imagination is essentially also a phenomenological method which incorporates a lot of Hillman’s processes and ideas, including the alchemical theory which advocates that images work like tinctures in the body; observed in the fact that a single image viscerally experienced in the body has the ability to change our entire psychic state.
Corbin’s influence introduces the hermeneutics of Sufi mysticism. This being that the world of imagination, the place where dreams and ideas come from, is not our personal unconscious as with Freud, neither is it the collective unconscious as with Jung, rather in the Sufi world view, it is the ontologically real and independent world of Imagination or the Mundus Imaginalis. According to Corbin we are able to engage with this Imaginal world through our soul as the organ of imaginal perception and the soul in turn he said is housed in our heart.
Bringing these thoughts together we find that Embodied Imagination becomes the meeting of traditional Jungian dream analysis, mysticism, phenomenology, alchemy and most importantly the alterity of the image.
In closing let me share with you Robert’s most recent answer of what Embodied Imagination is, he says:
“We are caught in Habitual consciousness - habit patterns of consciousness as identification of who I am” - [this creates a very limiting perspective of who I can be in this world. Freud referred to this habitual consciousness as the ego or the “i” - small i. And Jung in his work on word associations realised that the ego is but one of many complexes at play in our psyche. Thus the person who you think you are, the consciousness that makes up Franco for example is merely a collection of patterns or images, constellated as an emotionally toned complex.]
In Embodied Imagination we begin to notice how images constantly embody us, how in everyday life we are embodied by images. By engaging in this practice we begin to notice what Jung came to realise; that Psyche(soul) is not in us, in fact, we are in psyche(soul) - we are surrounded or encompassed by soul.
This practice of engaging and accessing the images of other is accomplished in the mimetic act or by mimesis. Mimesis means to mimic, and by using micro movements, almost too small to notice, we begin to circle the image of other, becoming more and more drawn into the image until, in a moment, the other envelops us. This is when we are the image and we experience the totality of otherness, thereby shifting our habitual conscious perspective - [At that moment we give our body to the image, the image adorning our physical body like a glove.]
This experience of the world from a different point of view helps us create a more adaptive and flexible mode of consciousness. And after all Darwin showed, adaptation is the most important quality that an organism requires in order to survive.
- (Video Interview: Jung Platform, Narcissism Conference April, 2023)
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