Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Psychotherapists use dream-analysis in their practice. They believe the unconscious plays a critical role in dreams and neuroses. Others believe there is no such thing as the unconscious, and they disdain dreams as unimportant by-products of the mind. While this discussion won’t revisit the ample evidence in support of the unconscious, it will take for granted that it is real. Since dreams arise out of the unconscious process of sleep, they can provide important clues about neurotic behaviors that also arise out of the unconscious.

A prominent patient of Jung presented symptoms of altitude sickness. He dreamt that he struggled frantically to gather his luggage for a train trip, missed the train, and watched it roll too fast around a bend, causing the rear coaches to tip over tragically. Jung suggested that the dream presents someone who has overstressed himself, climbed too high, too fast—hence, his daytime “mountain-sickness” symptoms—and fears he’ll have a disaster. The man rejected Jung’s therapy, overreached in his career, and suffered a calamity. “The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly,” Jung writes (5).

Dreams don’t necessarily hint at the cause of a patient’s neurosis, and, in fact, many such ailments aren’t caused by childhood trauma. Freudian therapists sometimes overlook the ways dreams can predict a patient’s future behavior and offer solutions to that behavior.

One woman consulted three analysts. Each time, she had a similar dream of crossing a frontier and getting lost; the dreams weren’t about the past but anticipated her future with each therapist. The third analyst was Jung. In a dream, she meets Jung at the customs desk, where she presents her purse from which he pulls two large mattresses. During therapy, the woman said she recently married but didn’t want to; this explains the mattresses hidden in her dream purse.

Dreams always send messages but interpreting them can become more difficult as therapy progresses, and the therapist struggles to reconcile the dreams with the complexities of the patient’s behaviors. Sometimes analysts will blame the patient for uncertainties that really belong to the analyst; it’s better to admit to uncertainty than to appear all-wise, which intimidates patients.

It’s also vital that therapists and patients arrive at mutual understandings of dreams, answers that appeal not merely to patients’ minds but to their hearts. Therapists shouldn’t base their dream interpretation upon a strict theory; neither should they try to influence patients through subtle suggestion. Instead, they can explore different ideas until the patient finds clarity in one of them. In that way, they learn together what the patient’s dreams mean.

When patients and analysts have trouble understanding a dream, they may be tempted to conclude that the dream is a “façade” that somehow hides its true meaning. Dreams aren’t disguises, but they can be hard to understand in the way that foreign languages can be hard to interpret.

One technique for deciphering a dream is to see what the patient associates with the images in it. This gives clues to the meanings of each image. A single dream may not say much, but several dreams together can suggest recurring themes and rule out earlier guesses. For this reason, Jung thus advises patients to keep a dream journal.

Dreams can portend life-and-death issues. A mountain-climbing colleague of Jung remarked that he dreamed of climbing a peak and then ascending the air above it. Jung warned him to climb with guides, but the man dismissed the idea. A few months later, he died in a climbing accident with a companion.

Freudians believe the purpose of therapy is to bring to light the roiling, untamed urges of the unconscious and learn to tame them. In contrast, Jung says that the unconscious is ethically neutral and only dangerous when repressed. Dreams are useful indicators of areas where the balance between conscious activity and unconscious needs gets out of balance.

A young man reported a dream in which his father drives drunk in a new car and crashes it. The young man was on excellent terms with his father; Jung realized that that the man was overly attached to his parent, and that the dream was the unconscious’s way of alerting the patient that he needed to be more independent. This interpretation clicked, and his life improved while his relationship to his father remained good. Neither of his conscious or unconscious processes were suppressed or overturned, and nothing bad arose from releasing the unconscious urge.

Some dream symbols have meanings that persist across many people, but they shouldn’t be interpreted simplistically. A phallus, for example, represents creative power and not simply genital urges, and not every symbol relates to sexuality. For example, one teenage girl suffered from muscle loss; she recalled dreams in which she finds her mother hanging from the ceiling, or a horse galloping through the house and jumping through a window to its death. Mother and horse both represent creativity and deep natural powers; Jung realized the girl was afraid her body was going to die. Indeed, further tests showed she was suffering from an organic disease.

The goal of therapy is for the patient to become a whole and complete individual. Therapy may cure patients, but then they leave, and therapists have little information about how their personalities continue to develop after therapy ends. Follow-up sessions might provide a fuller understanding of dream symbols and of the healing process in general.

When talking about psychotherapy, most people are referring to psychoanalysis, though there are several techniques that differ from Freud’s system. Adler calls his method “individual psychology,” and Jung refers to his as “analytical psychology” (29). Both titles are meant to embrace new and different therapeutic trends. Meanwhile, there are so many new types of therapy that people become confused about the entire field.

The large variety of therapies suggests that none is entirely successful. Worse, each has its own lingo, and the scientific approach taken by many, with its aura of the medical profession, irritates thoughtful philosophers, historians, and classical literature theorists. Still, psychotherapy has made progress. It takes four forms: “confession, explanation, education, and transformation” (31).

Confession refers to the methods whereby people unburden themselves of their secrets. A small amount of secrecy can help people stand up as individuals, and shared secrets can bond a group together, but privately held secrets can be destructive. When those secrets are kept even from the person who holds them, they take on their own life and begin to affect behavior negatively. Withheld emotions have the same effect. Both show up as slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, misunderstandings, clumsiness, and so forth; worse, they can manifest as illness; and in the most serious cases, such as the hidden urge to kill oneself, the hidden content may show up in serious accidents or the desire to do risky things.

Private secrets isolate us from others and from ourselves. Confessing secrets frees a person and relaxes others because it’s an admission that the person isn’t perfect. Ancient initiation rites often required the catharsis of confession. Full unburdening involves the release of stored emotions; doing so restores patients to the state before their secrets, so that they can resume their growth as human beings.

Especially intelligent people sometimes can lock away their unconscious sides so effectively that confession becomes unavailable to them. For others, the cathartic effects of confession become so compelling that they get stuck there and can’t move forward to live normal lives. For a third group, when therapy is successful, they begin to see the therapist as a parental figure, and childhood incestuous fantasies revive; this is called “transference,” something especially hard for patients to recognize, as such desires are nearly impossible to look at. Yet another group identifies with their parents, derives confidence from that connection, and resists attempts to look back into childhood.

Many people don’t want to hear that people have dark desires, or that “Even our purest and holiest beliefs can be traced to the crudest origins” (41). Yet it’s unrealistic to presume that good things exist in the absence of bad, or that soaring achievements never get their start in the mud.

Explanation occurs when therapists explain these principles and show how they apply to each patient. Patients can then use their reason to make progress in understanding themselves, obtain a humble acceptance of their own flaws, and cease to be sentimental and deluded about their lives.

Knowledge of their limits gives these patients understanding, but without a path forward they’re still effectively merely informed children. Adler, an important student of Freud, parts with his teacher by asserting that many people are driven, not by the search for pleasure, but by an obsessive desire for power, which they pursue to the exclusion of all else and end up failing because of that obsession. Adler de-emphasizes the unconscious and instead stresses the importance of re-educating patients, who, without a clear path to walk, receive from therapy insight without a way forward.

The Freudians believe that catharsis of unconscious drives is enough to cure the patient. Others believe that explanation will suffice. Adlerians, on the other hand, stress education. Each becomes absorbed by the feeling of finality that their approach brings. Still, therapists who follow one version of analysis also use the approaches of the other branches, even if unintentionally.

The fourth method, transformation, isn’t a cure-all. However, it does fill a gap left by the other methods, which seek to resolve neuroses and return patients to a state of being “normal” but look no further. “Normal” suggests average, and though it’s a great achievement for someone who’s dysfunctional to acquire the abilities of a normally socialized person, this can lead to stagnation, conformity, and lack of full self-expression.

The therapist must be aware that the patient will influence him even as he influences the patient: The doctor “is just as much in analysis” as is the patient (51). Done properly, transformation will happen to both; otherwise, the therapist may simply acquire the patient’s problem and fail to help with its cure. Ultimately, it’s the patients who must transform themselves, but this is much less likely if therapists haven’t also done the same.

In this way, therapy transforms from a process of taming the inner barbarian to an ongoing self-improvement project in which even the mentally healthy can, and should, participate. That path has yet fully to be realized.

Both Freud and Adler’s psychological techniques work well for people under 40, whose symptoms tend to conform to the standard analytical theories about the neurotic pursuits of pleasure and power. With older patients, though, the struggle isn’t about pursuing desires but about avoiding death. Even so, each patient is different, and no theory of mind explains everyone.

Other variables are useful in diagnosing patients. One is the contrast between introverted and extraverted people; another is the difference between those who tend toward the spiritual and those who lean toward the material. These variations tend to be inborn and unchanging. With so many factors to consider, it’s easier to be wrong than right in evaluating a patient. It’s wiser to rely on “pure experience” and avoid depending too much on theory: “The shoe that fits one person pinches another” (62).

Jung’s patients are those who haven’t responded to standard therapy. Usually, they’re past their middle years, don’t report neurotic symptoms, but do express emptiness or senselessness. For these patients, Jung often resorts to dream analysis, mainly for lack of other avenues of access to the source of the problem. Dream interpretation is an art and certainly not a science; Jung’s criterion for a successful interpretation of a dream is that “it works”—it resonates for the patient and proves helpful.

One patient reported a dream in which his sister’s two-year-old boy lies ill. The boy was, in fact, quite healthy in real life. The patient recalled that he recently took an interest in the occult, and that the image of a sick boy seemed to represent that newborn fascination, one he now realized he had come to doubt. Jung would never have reached that conclusion; the patient had to find it among his own memories.

Jung studies “primitive psychology, mythology, archæology and comparative religion” (66), for they contain analogies to dream symbols that greatly increase the ways patients can think about the meaning of their dreams. It’s a further development of the Freudian technique of “free association”—saying the first thing that comes to mind when prompted—that permits patients to open to the deeper side of their thoughts. Critics claim these exercises are mere fantasies, but Jung believes that fantasizing can be fruitful, especially as it pulls up hidden yearnings that can be aired out. In doing this, patients begin to see that their urges—including spiritual needs that are hard to accept in the modern, hyper-rational world—share common roots with human culture.

Patients can be passive and childlike about interpreting their dreams. To give them a sense of active participation in the search for greater understanding, Jung sometimes has patients draw or paint images from their dreams. The effort gives these dreams a greater sense of reality. Sketching the details offers more for the patient to think about. Illustrating dreams also becomes a technique by which patients can deal with problems that may arise in the future. The process tends to enlarge patients’ sense of themselves, not as mere egos, but as whole human beings with deep mental resources.

Younger people are still building their conscious minds, but older ones, having achieved success, no longer need to strengthen their will; instead, they need to explore the depths of their being to find in themselves that which gives their life purpose. Their dreams, and the pictures they may draw of those dreams, often seem barbaric, especially in the use of color. These symbols arise from the “collective unconscious,” urges common to all and symbolized since ancient times in the arts through brutal symbols.

Therapy can lead to increased vigor and enthusiasm for life. Because this form of therapy is still new, it’s unclear exactly how patients come upon this renewal, or what its source is. Primitive images from dreams can be dismissed as illusions, but this overlooks the powerful psychic truths that underlie them. Rational explanations often are attempts to control the power of our deepest urges; such interpretations constrict our understanding. Descriptions and illustrations of dream symbols help to bring the unconscious to the surface, where its powers can be seen and understood, not logically but directly.