Jung’ s Theory
It remained for one of Freud’ s early associates( later an apostate), Carl Jung, to examine dreams for evidence of a racial uncon scious that all men share( Jung 1960). Jung was convinced that there was sufficient evidence in dreams and other types of material, e. g., myths and religion, to validate the concept of a collective unconscious. He called the contents of this unconscious“ archetypes” and identified a number of them: the anima, the shadow, the earth mother, the wise old man, and, most important of all, the archetype of personal unity symbolically represented in dreams and elsewhere by the form of the mandala. Whereas Freud used dreams to explore the formative years of a person’ s life, Jung used them to explore the psychological development of the race.
Jung also thought, in contradistinction to Freud, that dreams are oriented to the future as well as to the past. They mark out for the individual the proper path to a more complete actualization of personality and help reveal poorly developed parts of the personality.
Other Theories
In addition to the theories of Freud and Jung, there are a number of other theories, for example, those of Hall( 1953), French( 1954), Hadfield( 1954), Boss( 1953), Ullman( 1955; 1958; 1959), and Jones( 1962). These have several features in common. They deal more with the manifest than with the latent content, and they are more concerned with the dream as an expression having adaptive significance for the dreamer than as a disguise for infantile wishes. Hall, for example, regards the dream as a concrete representation of the dreamer’ s conception of himself, of others, and of his world. The dream reveals more than it conceals. French stresses the integrative role played by the dream.
The dreamer is attempting to solve his emotional problems. Hadfield also sees the dream as problem-solving activity, and Ullman emphasizes the dream’ s adaptive function. For Boss, an existential – phenomenological therapist, the dream is a confrontation experience in which the dreamer faces directly his own questions of existence as a unique experiencing self. In the most recent of these theoretical formulations, Jones describes the synthesizing function of the dream within the context of a developmental sequence of critical phases through which a person passes in growing up.
It would seem from these theories that the dream was a complex, multidimensional, multileveled phenomenon capable of supporting diverse theoretical superstructures. The dream may, in fact, be just such a complex phenomenon, although the ratio of research to speculation is still so small that it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions regarding the validity of these speculations. Although research is scanty, the usefulness of dream analysis in psycho-analytic and other forms of psychotherapy seems to be generally acknowledged by psychotherapists( Bonime 1962).
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