“Why should / have such disgusting dreams?”
Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
Every interpretation of a dream is a psychological statement about certain of its contents.
This is not without danger, as the dreamer, like most people, usually displays an astonishing sensitiveness to critical remarks, not only if they are wrong, but even more if they are right.
Since it is not possible, except under very special conditions, to work out the meaning of a dream without the collaboration of the dreamer, an extraordinary amount of tact is required not to violate his self-respect unnecessarily.
For instance, what is one to say when a patient tells a number of indecent dreams and then asks: “Why should / have such disgusting dreams?”
To this sort of question it is better to give no answer, since an answer is difficult for several reasons, especially for the beginner, and one is very apt under such circumstances to say something clumsy, above all when one thinks one knows what the answer is.
So difficult is it to understand a dream that for a long time I have made it a rule, when someone tells me a dream and asks for my opinion, to say first of all to myself: “I have no idea what this dream means.”
After that I can begin to examine the dream. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 533
Dr’s Jung and Tiso Exchange Dreams
I have found great difficulty, in my clinical practice, working with black clients.
Whereas with white clients I have been able to work psychodynamically, looking at personal and affective issues, with black clients we seem unable to connect on anything other than the most concrete of issues.
Questions about feelings are typically met with a blank response, questions about internal thoughts or experiences with frank confusion.
I found this exceptionally frustrating, and have tended to work only towards assisting with the most concrete of concerns, and perhaps, if I feel particularly energetic, to attempt to teach problem solving skills.
It is not that I believe black people do not have an interiority.
Indeed, I believe that they probably have a greater capacity for emotion and expressiveness than my conservative, British white family.
I am often reminded of a priest once made to me that black Africans have no soul.
He was not saying that they could not become Christians.
He was saying that they had no capacity for spirituality or depth.
I found this statement horrifying and have never been able to work out if he
was being serious or provocative.
Either way, it has stuck in my psyche, and when I work with black clients and experience the frustration, I begin to wonder whether there is not, in fact, any truth in what he said.
These thoughts and feelings have never sat comfortably in my mind.
I believe that we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, racist.
I am troubled by people who deny that they have racial prejudices, because this simply cannot be so in our world (Korber 1990: 49).
But these thoughts and feelings that I have disclosed here reek of racism, and feel
quite out of place in my sense of who I am.
And so I was greatly encouraged when I heard Vera Bührmann give a
lecture to the Association of Jungian Analysts a few years ago, about dream
work amongst Xhosa people.
For the first time I had a sense of some kind of resolution of my dilemma.
I subsequently had a black client who was caught between two women – one whom he loved and the one his parents had made him marry.
He was torn, in essence between self and culture (respectively).
For the first time, I felt I was truly interacting with a black client. I asked if he had had any dreams, and he revealed that he had.
He had dreamed that the two women had met in the street and were fighting over him.
He was separate from them, watching, feeling bad and guilty, and longing for the
woman he loved.
This dream returned to him repeatedly and caused him great distress – he was
becoming depressed.
We were able to speak about the dream symbolism as a clash of two cultures: the one into which he was born and the one into which he was growing.
While the dream did not directly resolve the conflict for him, it helped him to think more clearly about the nature of the conflict and the changes in his sense of self.
Holdstock (1979: 120) says:
“It is essentially Jung’s work with dreams, his process of individuation, and his concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes which share a great deal of commonality with the principles underlying indigenous healing.”
It is true that no therapy can occur in a cultural vacuum (Kruger 1980: 25). Korber (1990: 49) uotes Schoeman (1985),
“no matter how much one wishes to enter the other person’s events, your interpretations and descriptions, are all codetermined by the consensually
validated concepts and categories of thought of your own culture.”
Jung’s theoretical framework and world view, however, offer the possibility of improved communication between white and black about matters of the unconscious.
This assignment is an attempt to explore the points of convergence between these two world views.
In effect, this is two papers. The first is a Jungian discussion of dreams.
Various non-technical aspects of dreams will be addressed, such as symbols, compensation and subjective interpretations.
The second paper is an African discussion of dreams.
Many of the foundational concepts of this article are drawn from Vera Bührmann’s conversations with Mongenzi Tiso, a Xhosa Igqira, with whom she worked for many years.
The same aspects of dreams covered in the first article will be covered here as well.
The two papers can, therefore, be read separately and independently, or they can be read in parallel, making comparisons between the two world views.
I will conclude with a few comments on Jungian dream analysis.
The Western Psyche Adams (1996: 54) summarizes Lévy-Bruhl’s work on the characteristics of “civilized” societies as follows:
“abstract concepts detachment from sense impressions intellect (thinking) logical causal individual law of contradiction subject-object duality”
Bührmann notes that western culture is heavily invested in technology, rationality,
logic, individualism and linear causality.
She writes that
“the ego has developed at the expense of the unconscious matrix from which it was born. … It has led to considerable impoverishment of the inner life of man and is largely responsible for the sense of meaninglessness which pervades our present-day Western way of life” (1984: 22).
Holistic View of Humanity
In contrast with much of twentieth century Platonic dualism (Russell 1979: 304), Jung’s understanding of the psyche “denotes man as a whole, body, mind and spirit” (Harris 1975:
3). “Western medicine divides illness into the
The African Psyche Adams (1996: 54) summarizes Lévy-Bruhl’s
work on the charactaristics of “primitive” societies as follows:
“concrete percepts attachment to sense impressions emotion (feeling) prelogical mystical collective law of participation subject-object unity”
Bührmann notes that the African culture has retained a close relationship to the
unconscious.
She writes,
“Our Black compatriots have the advantage of still living close to the world of the unconscious, where symbols are still alive and vibrant and where archetypcal images form a natural part of their daily existence and direct their behaviour in ways which sometimes seem irrational to us … They function largely on the level of intuition and feeling, and image, not concept, is their main mode of apperception” (in Schoeman 1985: 9).
Jung himself argues that the people of North Africa “live from their affects, are moved and have their being in emotion.
Their consciousness takes care of their orientation in space and transmits impressions from different categories of somatic, psychological and psychosomatic” (Bührmann 1984: 26).
In contrast, Jung says,
“A wrong functioning of the psyche can do much to injure the body, just as conversely a bodily illness can affect the psyche; for psyche and body are not separate entities but one and the same life” (CW 7: para 115).
Jung is emphatic that psychological neuroses cannot be understood independently of the body: the two are inextricably interdependent (CW 16: para
83).
Inasmuch as there is no fundamental distinction between body and mind,
“Dreams, as a whole, are spontaneous expressions of our entire psychosomatic being, and show every indication of being the product of the central core of our being” (Broadribb 1990: 2).
Fundamental to Jung’s theory of the mind is the collective unconscious, which is taken to be a universal, in-born structure in the psyche.
The collective unconscious is probably
“the most fundamental and distinctive concept in analytical psychology” (Hopcke 1989: 13).
This psychic structure is unique in that
“it is detached from anything personal and is common to all men, since its
contents can be found everywhere, which is naturally not the case with the personal contents” (CW 7: para 103).
Jung discovered the collective unconscious outside, and it is also stirred by inner
impulses and affects. But it is not given to reflection; the ego has almost no autonomy” (1963: 270).
Adrian D. Van Breda, Dr’s Jung and Tiso Exchange Dreams, Page 1-3
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