Customer Reviews

Seminar on Dream Analysis. C.G. Jung (v. 1)

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If one has read some of Jung's scientific books, or any of his books, something in each is touched upon in the Dream Analysis seminars collected in this volume. Jung, over the course of about six months of weekly lectures, analyses the dreams of a male patient in his late forties. This in itself is a rarity because Jung did not discuss men's dreams as often as those of his women patients. It is difficult to avoid such words as "remarkable" or "astonishing" in describing what Jung does here. Jung purposely chooses "everyday" dreams and not "big archetypal" ones to analyse because, as he says, the everyday ones are more difficult to analyse and therefore the more analytically instructive. Jung's forays into mythology, anthropology, 'primitive' psychology, religion, and philosophy, as well as into his own psychological concepts of the psyche, are truly an experience to behold, if only after the fact in this transcript. The volume's editor quotes Jung as admitting that there were errors in some of Jung's extemporaneous expositions which should be, are are, clearly corrected. But these are few and do not take away from the whole, which is a "method" of dream analysis whose effect is little short of the realization before one's eyes of the whole psychic life of one man in all of its hidden nuances and overt terrors and where nothing less than the history of mankind and all that it has thought and felt over centuries and centuries is brought in as an aid in the explanation. One cannot help (especially if one is a man) to see oneself as the dreamer in many instances, making the book salutary beyond any self-help dream "cookbook". One gets a sense of Jung alive with his daemon standing there transfixed by his topic and simply pouring out what he knows to be true. A convincing, remarkable performance.

Dreams have immense practical meaming for the individual and in some cases for the culture he is immersed in.
I am quite sure that many youngsters in New Orleans had preminition dreams about the impending disaster of hurricane Katrina.
However there is no organization set up in place which these dreams could have been taken to the *elders* of the community and discussed as to a course of action to take.
IOW had the dreams of revelation of future events been listened to and a proper course of action and a educated response could have resulted ina much less suffering.
Those with faith and BELIEVED in these children's dreams of the impending disaster, would have taken the necessary precautions to evacuate and thus may have known to take their beloved pets with them.
As it was no dreams were recorded, and so Katrina came with unseen fury as a theif in the night. Dreams reveal things we refuse to see or that we should well take into account. Peoples pets died in this storm.
Jung's grasp of dream language provides a working model of how one approaches these odd storied messages.
Even the smallest details has something to convey to the entire picture of meaning.
Man faces a world in which triubles surround him on all sides.
Never before has it been of utmost importance to understand ones dreams as the days we live in. Dreams very often forewarn one of some impending danger if a certain attitude is continued.
Now is the time to read Jung's Seminar on Dream Analysis.
I should mention , if you are atheist you will find reading any Jung to be very rough going, to the point of *its no use*.
Jung emphasized in all his works a proper religious(not *churchy* type) attitude is essential to work with the psyche.
Listen and understand your dreams, this will show the atheists what Jung is getting at.
Atheists have a recurrent image running throughout all their dreams.
Merry-go-round is one typical image, and also the car won't start, or you have 4 flat tires, or you run out of gas. All these are very typical images in atheists.
Paul
July 3,2008

EDIT
For those with any serious interest in becomming a profesion psychotherapist or any realted profession, , this book is essential
Jung was far ahead of his time in diagnosing peoples psyches. This book was from a seminar given in 1930, before most readers birth. Imagine that!!! Yet still has not been given its due credence by the healing profession. Shows how mankind is still in the dark ages.
The only one associate Jung had that followed in his path was Von Franz.
What transpired after Jung's death , has become JungianISM. Which Jung, being the *prophet* (powerful intuition) that he was, predicted there would be rampant JungianISM following his ideas.
Von Franz in her book, His Myth In Our Time, says that Jung is well on his way to becomming better known. Von Franz missed it by some yeras.
Still we see very little following in Jung. I forsee a better acceptance and interest in Jung beginning sometime next 2 decades. Yes it will take that long.
I do not attend any Jungian group, nor visit the Jungain Chat Board called Kaleidoscope.
*been there done that*. JungianISM is not my *cup of tea*.
Amazing that most all who follow Jung are atheists. Yet Jung himself explicitly stated that w/o experience of the soul his concepts are dead on paper. If you are atheist you are wasting your time in Jung.
The christians , fundamental that is, have fear of Jung. Yet its the christians who are ina better position to grasp his ideas. Versus the atheists who have no spiritual experience, and yet flock to Jung as their life line to a connection to the would within.
Strange times we live in, weird world we inhabit.
Paul Best
July 17,2008
New Orleans

....was often at his best (and worst) in his seminars, some of which have now been translated into English. Jung often spoke directly out of his intuition and spiced what he said with numerous illustrations from case histories and his own special studies.

I just had a few comments on this book. I cover a lot of ground in this review, ranging from depth psychology to neurobiology, so I apologize in advance for that, but most of it is relevant to the discussion of dreams and the brain.

While I like Jung and am very familiar with his ideas, and notwithstanding the fact that he has faired better than Freud as far as his long-term reputation goes in recent decades (and he's certainly a better authority than most to cite here), he still has that fascination with dreams which he and many depth psychologists of the day inherited from the 19th century European mystical and early psychological tradition.

Unfortunately, in contrast to previous decades (especially the pre-60s era) where Freudian therapists were all the rage and were portrayed in films like Mirage (which starred Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman) and Psycho as heros engaged in life or death battles with the dark forces of the subconscious, psychotherapy and psychoanalytic theory has not faired that well scientifically in recent decades, and the obsession with dreams is another aspect of their focus which hasn't worked out very well, either.

So, while I certainly respect and admire many of the early psychologists, and they were great pioneers in many ways, and some of their ideas are still important, nevertheless, a lot of what they said has to be taken now with a considerable grain of salt. It doesn't mean that dreams are completely valueless, but they're of much less significance than has been claimed in the past.

However, the most serious critique of the psycholanalytic (and others) view of dreams comes from recent research into the brain and neurobiology. The problem is that dreams are really not what people think at all most of the time--which is some sort of cyptic but profound message from the unconscious mind.

For example, consider the question of why most dreams seem to consist of collections or sequences of difficult to interpret images, thoughts, and memories that seem to be combined or strung together in a not very logical and difficult to interpret fashion. The reason why, contrary to the popular belief that this reflects some profound and not easily discernible meaning, is that the order really is almost random, or is governed by very weak associational processes. The reason why this is, and why most dreams seem so puzzling and difficult to understand is that when you go to sleep, the memory areas of the brain located in the temporal cortex become more active through a process known as corticocipedal disinhibition, allowing memories, images, and thoughts to flood into consciousness willy-nilly. This is prevented or inhibited during normal waking, otherwise the flood of thoughts and images would interfere with normal memory retrieval and thinking processes.

This explanation wasn't understood until about 30 years ago and comes from important research into the neurobiology of dreaming and consciousness. Most people, though, still have these old, pre-scientific notions that they have some sort of profound significance. If you're under a lot of stress, such as on the job, or whatever, and you dream that your boss just fired you, okay, that's different. Obviously the dream has some relation to reality (which in this case shouldn't be that hard to figure out).

But most of the time the dream will be something like the following: boss calls you into his or her office and tells you to fly away with him in a great, golden chariot with six magical, flying, white horses on a secret mission into the future, or the past, or whatever. So you do. At that point you wake up and think to yourself, "What the hell did that mean? I don't know but it must be something very profound. It must mean my boss really likes me after all, and that I'm destined to do great things on the job since we flew off together into the sunset in this great chariot drawn by six flying, white horses."

Unfortunately, the simple fact is that the dream doesn't really mean anything. It means you had a dream that used as its point of departure your boss or job, since that's what's currently on your mind, but after that, the free-associational flow of dream images and thoughts took over and produced the usual semi-nonsensical concatenation of dream images and thoughts.

I realize this explanation won't appeal to many people, but as someone wiser than I once said, "God is a mathematician, and so the universe works according to physical and biological laws, rather than as mystics, poets, lovers, romantics, and New Agers (and adherents of other touch-feely philosophies and beliefs), would have liked."

Despite that, I give the book five stars in recognition of Jung's tremendous historical importance to the field of psychology, especially his work in archetypes which has influenced countless of other writers and thinkers such as Joseph Campbell.