A great work of art is like a dream
“A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal.”
(There is nothing like being never unequivocal.)
(Interesting that The Dream was the last painting of Rousseau…)
“In this way the work of the poet comes to meet the spiritual need of the society in which he lives, and for this reason his work means more to him than his personal fate, whether he is aware of this or not. Being essentially the instrument for his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no reason for expecting him to interpret it for us.
He has done the best that in him lies in giving it form, and he must leave the interpretation to others and to the future. A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: “You ought”, or “This is the truth..”
It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions.
If a person has a nightmare, it means either that he is too much given to fear, or else that he is too exempt from it; and if he dreams of the old wise man it may mean that he is too pedagogical, as also that he stands in need of a teacher. In a subtle way both meanings come to the same thing, as we perceive when we are able to let the work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist.
To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it once shaped him. Then we understand the nature of his experience.
We see that he has drawn upon the healing and redeeming forces of the collected psyche that underlies consciousness with its isolation and its painful errors; that he has penetrated to that matrix of life in which all men are embedded, which imparts a common rhythm to all human existence, and allows the individual to communicate his feeling and his striving to mankind as a whole.” ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
The “Art of Interpreting Dreams.”
Civilization in Transition (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 10)
The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books.
Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them.
Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands.
No one who does not know himself can know others.
And in each of us there is another whom we do not know.
He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.
When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude—the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 325
Dr. von Franz, how much of dream interpretation is scientific and how much is an art?
I think there is something of both in it. There are helpful rules of thumb which are purely technical or scientific which you can apply, and whenever I don’t understand a dream I go back to them. I say, “Now what is the exposition of the dream, what is the setting up, what is the association?” And you can generally get quite far with the technique. But naturally, there is a kind of practitioner’s skill which you develop and can’t impart to a beginner. It is like an old carpenter.
He can tell a young carpenter how to use the tools and how to measure and how to cut the wood, but there is a certain touch of the wood which he cannot c6nvey. The beginner has to work twenty years with wood, and then he’ll have the same kind of touch. When one has interpreted many dreams and puzzled about many dreams, one gets a certain hang of it, so to speak, a professional skill which has to do with feeling, with a mediumistic feeling, with an empathy into the other person.
Is there a technique for approaching a dream to discover its meaning?
In Jungian psychology, we have a technique. We compare the dream to a drama and examine it under three structural headings: first, the introduction or exposition-the setting of the dream and the naming of the problem; second, the peripeteia-that would be the ups and downs of the story; and finally, the lysis–the end solution or, perhaps, catastrophe. And if I don’t understand a dream, I use that scheme. First I say to myself, “Now, what is the introduction?”
The first sentence of a dream generally gives the setting and introduces the major characters. For example, a dream might begin, “I am in my childhood home with my friend Bob.” You take the first sentence and ask the dreamer for his associations. “What was your childhood home like? How did you feel there? Were you happy there? How long did you stay there?”
And then you ask about the friend, “How is your friend Bob? What was he like? . . . Oh, I see, he was a bore, but you did all your childhood mischief together. ” And then you insert these associations into the text, which then becomes, “I am psychologically still in my boyhood situation, and I am with a part of myself which is boring, but also mischievous. ”
Once you have that translation, you have naturally to think about how it applies to the moment of the dream and to the dreamer’s life. In what way does the dreamer still have one leg in his childhood home? Where in his life situation is he still reacting as he reacted as a boy? You have to assume that the dream is speaking about that corner of his personality.
After you’ve looked at the exposition in this way, you then go on to the naming of the problem. Let’s say a car comes up the driveway and two dark burglars jump out. Now you have a dramatic development, which means a specific story is now being told. The two dark men would be an invasion, s
#AnalyticalPsychology #DepthPsychology #CarlJung #TheUnconscious #JungianPsychology #Psyche #JungianConcepts #PsychologicalType #Archetypes #Individuation