Modern Man in Search of a Soul
by Carl G. Jung
Editor’s note
I have recently come to love two podcasts: Overdue and Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Both of these podcasts celebrate reading and sharing what we gather from reading. If you have not had a chance to check out either of those podcasts, I would highly recommend them. This entry in the sketchbook is a part of a series I have decided to call The Library Card. In this series, I am going to follow the leads of both Overdue and Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, sharing my thoughts while playing around with the ideas of the books that I am reading.
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
C. G. Jung
Broadway House
1933
Dream-Analysis in its Practical Application
Blind Contour Recap
To Do.
Notes
Jung’s representative example of dream interpretation:
Here, too, we can understand without much difficulty the situation represented by the dream… it is clear that, at this period of life, the patient had reached the highest point of his career–that the effort of the long ascent from his lowly origin had exhausted his strength. he should have contented himself with his achievements, but instead he is driven by his ambition to attempt to scale heights of success for which he is not fitted. The neurosis came upon him as a warning.
Wow, easy Jung. Your patient described a train derailing, and you, considering him as an upstart that has risen too far too quickly, decide that the dream means that he was over ambitious and that he should stop while he is ahead. Jung goes so far to say that the patient’s neurosis is a warning, presumably meant to protect him, from his inevitable demise if he continues on in his career.
This is what scares me about dream analysis: what if we are wrong? I am not so sure that Jung should claim that a dream’s meaning is ‘clear’ or that we can undestand our dreams ‘without much difficulty’. What worries me is that we can read in flawed biases and prejudices into our own dreams and the dreams of others.