In fact - and I admit this with difficulty - I have boundless admiration for you, both as a man and as a as a researcher, and I do not consciously blame you... My veneration because you have a “religious” crush. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay - Carl Jung, in a letter to Freud, October 28, 1907. A transference on a religious basis would seem to me most disastrous; this could only lead to apostasy, thanks to the universal human tendency to continue to imprint new imprints of the clichés that we carry within us. I will do my best to show you that I am not fit to be an object of worship.--Freud to Jung, November 15, 1907Sigmund Freud wrote extensively, although inconsistently, on the question of dream symbolism. Separating his ideas will reveal their uncanny similarity to Jung's work on the collective unconscious in dreams. In this context, how might we understand the two thinkers in relation to each other? But we must first clarify Freud's use of the term symbol. The manifest content is the substitute for the latent content of a dream. Interpretation simply consists of replacing any manifest image with its determinant. Free association is the primary means of accomplishing this feat. This necessarily implies that any given dream object acts as the representative of an idea that the censor has carefully blocked from consciousness. Following this logic, the reader should have no difficulty in characterizing any dream image as a symbol.* The very first image analyzed by Freud lends itself to this overall characterization: “The room - many guests we were entertaining. We were spending that summer. in Bellevue, a house on one of the hills adjoining the Kahlenberg... The day before [before the dream], my wife had told me that she expected that several friends, including Irma, would come to visit us the sound birthday. My dream therefore anticipated this opportunity. "In the dream itself, there is no explicit reference to Freud's wife or to Bellevue. The room evokes this group of ideas by association alone. The gap between what one hears and what Freud actually sees in his sleep is summed up quite easily by a formula: the room is symbolic of the birthday party. This quick formula, however, seems to put a lot of pressure on the idea of ​​symbolism. a birthday party seems to have so little importance A symbol must, we tend to feel, designate a great event, a deep brotherhood, a deep relationship a cross, a flag, a lock of hair; lover are all symbols. But this strict definition is too restrictive for psychoanalysis, which is in part the science of determining what exactly is important. Any page of Freud illustrates the insignificance of the concept of insignificance. Since a birthday party can weigh more heavily on the psyche than the Apocalypse, it is clear that a Freudian model of symbolism cannot reject a possible symbol on the grounds that it does not seem important enough to us. Freud himself might argue that the room fails his litmus test for a symbol because it is not sexual in nature (although a room certainly could be). Summarizing section E ("Representation by Symbols") of the chapter on dream work in The Interpretation of Dreams, he writes in On Dreams that there is only one method by which a dream which expresses Erotic desires can manage to appear innocently non-sexual in the dream. its manifest content... Unlike other forms of indirect representation,what is used in the dream should not be immediately intelligible. Modes of representation that meet these conditions are generally described as “symbols” of the things they represent. This standard is inconsistent with his use of the term. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he considers baggage to be symbolic of a "burden of sin" and earlier claims that Wilhelm Stekel elucidated our understanding of the "symbolism of death". According to Freud's definition, the expression "death symbolism" is completely incomprehensible, because all symbols are supposed to be sexual. The other point raised above by Freud, namely that symbols must "not be immediately intelligible", is itself unintelligible in the context of his method. Some associations made by Freud are terribly obscure at first glance. The “propionic acid preparation” does not seem, at first glance, to symbolize Freud’s “great caution”; a large chain of associations is necessary before the dreamer is allowed to make this connection. Freud admits that such a connection may be the result of a "wild and senseless chain of thought." Therefore, neither sexuality nor unintelligibility is enough to distinguish a symbol from any meaningful (representative) object in a dream. The final conceivable objection to the notion of a "symbolic room" as presented in the Dream of Irma's Injection is that this particular representation is not common. sufficient to qualify as a symbol. Everyone knows what the Cross symbolizes, while only Freud knows the meaning of the room. Indeed, the commonality or mere popularity of a representation is what, according to Freud, makes a symbol a symbol – despite his explicit writings to the contrary. There is no other possible explanation for the statement that "the rooms represent women" and "the stairs or climbing upstairs represent sexual intercourse", while "propionic acid" does not reach only at the level of "substitution", other than the fact that the stairs and rooms work their magic on an almost universal scale. Freud, however, attempts to show clearly that certain “symbols [are] constructed by an individual from his own ideal material.” However, examples of this kind in Dream Interpretation are non-existent. If a symbol could emerge from the dreamer's personal "ideal material," symbolism would no longer be an expedient for the interpretation of dreams or "popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom [or] current jokes." And above all, symbolism is an expedient, a trick, a ready-made explanation. In the opening passages of “Representation through Symbols,” Freud offers us an explanation of our own dreams without requiring us to sit on his couch to wrestle with resistant associations. Symbols “fill the void,” so to speak, when “the dreamer’s free associations leave us in a pickle.” This poses a problem. For if Freud wants us to believe that a symbol can transcend the dreamer's associations, then is he not suggesting that the formation of a symbol is fundamentally different from the formation of a non-symbolic dream object, such as the propionic acid? Freud's recommendation of a "combined technique" that attacks latent content by relying on both the "dreamer's associations" and the "interpreter's knowledge of symbols" raises this question. To the extent that it assumes that one can analyze a given part of a dream without referring to the dreamer's associations, it poses the difficult idea that the content of a dream may be partly determined by something other than the dreamer's associations. dreamer's experience. In short, the existence of symbols (in the sense in which Freud actually uses thisterm) does it require that there be a sort of “collective unconscious” floating in a transcendental psychic domain? This is the first time that Freud addresses the question of the formation of symbols. , in his “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” he refers to such a strange and apparently unscientific abstraction: “[T]here was an event which consisted of B+A. A was a fortuitous circumstance; B was appropriate to produce the lasting effect. The reproduction of this event in memory has now taken such a form that it is as if A had taken the place of B, becoming a substitute, a symbol of B. "The mechanism is as individual as digestion. . A is associated in the mind with the more important B by "fortuitous circumstance", and therefore A represents B. This simple, almost Pavlovian model anticipates Freud's later explanation of our need to specifically mask erotic/traumatic content: it certainly has a "more lasting effect," as he puts it. But if we follow the model literally, we find ourselves once again forced to label personal dream images, like propionic acid, as symbols. Therefore, this first attempt to explain the mechanism of symbol formation, although to some extent prophetic, is not particularly useful. There is no trace of the uniformity beyond personal boundaries that defines it. symbolism. Is it possible, however, to expand this model so that it can account for uniformity? If A were to occur to everyone who experiences B, then we could easily do without the uncomfortable idea of ​​a "collective unconscious" or "inherent sense." Freud actually suggests something along these lines by explaining why a staircase - one example in a hundred - comes to designate sexual intercourse. He writes in his essay "Future Perspectives of Psychoanalysis" that "the rhythmic pattern of copulation", i.e. B in the model, "is reproduced while climbing the stairs", i.e. A. The linguistic explanation of the symbolism of the staircase fits the pattern within the pattern. in the same way. All Germans “besides” associate climbing stairs, or going up (“steigen”) with the sex climber (“Steiger”), so to speak. In English, the relationship is roughly analogous: in slang, we say "to go up", or to go on board. Common experience seen in this light is neither profound nor confusing. It is simply the sum of personal, linguistic or physical experiences. The formation of symbolism is therefore returned to the individual. This easy explanation, however, does not agree with a striking assertion of Freud's, referred to earlier by the term "combined technique," that the symbols used in dream work are completely unknown to the dreamer. Such a meaning must be unknown, otherwise there is no reason for the dreamer's associations, or lack thereof, to leave an interpretation "in check." The B+A model necessarily implies that the dreamer can understand the meaning of any symbol through a basic associative chain: A staircase - rhythm of steps - rhythm of the body - up, up, up - sexual intercourse. Resistance does not block revelation here, because only unconscious knowledge can be resisted. There is no knowledge here, in the conventional sense of the term. The dreamer does not know in any way that the stairs are sex. And yet they are. There is therefore a fundamental contradiction. It is impossible for the dreamer to be completely unaware of the equation he is actually using. He must know it somehow. We're stuck. The way out of this quagmire is, in fact, that otherworldly demon, the dubious prehistory of the psyche, the collective unconscious, as Jung would later call it. ATotally impersonal knowledge is now possible. Because here, as Freud writes in his essay “Outline of Psychoanalysis”, published posthumously, certain “materials” are accessible which can come neither from the adult life of the dreamer, nor from his forgotten childhood. We are obliged to consider it as part of the archaic heritage that a child brings with him to the world, before any experience of his own, influenced by the experiences of his ancestors... The dream thus constitutes a source of human prehistory which is not to be despised. It is no coincidence that Freud wrote this astonishing, and perhaps anti-Freudian, passage at the very end of his career. He had only alluded to this bizarre idea in The Interpretation of Dreams, writing that those "things which are symbolically linked today were probably united in prehistoric times by a conceptual and linguistic identity." But this confusing phrase does not require us to accept the borderline mystical idea of ​​knowledge before experience. Our ancestors might have simply climbed the same stairs as we do today. In 1900, a Freudian could still hold on to the pretty A+B model. By 1940, the astonishing frequency with which the same symbol had visited unrelated dreamers, "often going beyond the use of a common language", suggested to Freud something deeper than a simple pattern of experience. If Dora of Vienna and Jacob of Genesis can imagine such a similar picture, then there must be "human prehistory." Suddenly Freud looks like a Jungian. Indeed, the similarities between the late Freud and his greatest dissident, Jung, are striking. Jung defines the collective unconscious as "the reservoir of latent memory traces inherited from man's ancestral past, a past which includes not only the racial history of man as a distinct species, but also his prehuman or prehuman ancestry." animal”. Freud's "archaic history" and Jung's "ancestral past" differ in diction and not in essence. Both presuppose that a child can somehow inherit memories and experiences. The unbeliever might attempt to reconcile such a notion with conventional scientific (or Freudian) thinking by asserting that we have inherited only the predisposition to represent ideas in the same way that our ancestors did, in the same way that we have probably tend to like similar types of foods. . This answer skirts the problem only because it doesn't solve it; The unconscious “material” and the “memory traces” are hardly predispositions. However, the two thinkers differed radically on the theory of dreams. Jung had the advantage of basing his most innovative work on the "personal unconscious" on what he knew about the collective unconscious, while Freud focused his energies on common, perhaps universal, childhood stories. Thus, Jung can see the dream of ladders or stairs as a symbol of a drama rooted in a land far more fertile than the narrow swamp of our unfulfilled sexual desires. In his essay "The Symbolism of the Individual Dream in Relation to Alchemy", in which he attempts to situate the unconscious of a particular individual in relation to the collective, Jung analyzes the following dream: "A dangerous walk with the father and the mother, going up and down many ladders. " We know immediately what Freud would make of it. A ladder is “analogous” to a staircase and therefore fulfills the same symbolic function: copulation. He would see the “danger” as a manifestation of the fear of incest, the “up and down” as the fulfillment of infantile desire As for the so-called bisexual element of the dream (“Father and Mother”), Freud would certainly formulate many.conjectures. Jung is a little more poetic: "Regression [in this case, towards mother and father] means the disintegration of our historical and hereditary determinants, and only with the greatest effort can we free ourselves from their embrace. Our psychic prehistory is, in truth, the spirit of gravity, which needs steps and ladders because, unlike the disembodied aerial intellect, it cannot fly at will. "If we accept the collective unconscious, there is absolutely no reason not to follow Jung in considering "regression" as potentially a regression back to our primordial roots, because "each man, in a sense, represents the whole of humanity and its history." Why stop at childhood, when before childhood lies another important stage of development? The Freud who wrote The Interpretation of Dreams would undoubtedly see this analysis? Jungian as a mystical down, not as a regression towards a psychic prehistory but rather “towards the technique of interpretation used by the ancients, for whom the interpretation of dreams was identical to the interpretation by means of symbols” We can follow. Freud takes a few steps into this hypothetical critique The question of proof certainly looms over Jung's complex analysis of how he knows that a scale represents the vicissitudes of the individual unconscious as it struggles to escape its "determinants." hereditary”? At least Freud can support his formulas by pointing out, for example, an experiment by Betlheim and Hartmann (1924), in which Korsakoff's patients who were told "grossly sexual" stories substituted stairs (or shootings) or stabbing) for sexual intercourse when they reproduced these stories. Rather, Jung relies entirely on context – the broadest context imaginable. “Scientific knowledge,” he rightly asserts, “satisfies only the small part of the personality which is contemporary with ourselves, and not the collective psyche.” He must always convince us of the preponderance of evidence, whereas Freud can cite scientific articles. Jung can, however, claim consistency. He integrates the collective unconscious and even telepathy into his dream theory. Freud's last-minute revision condemns him to incongruity, for he never refers to pre-life experience in the analysis of a dream in The Interpretation of Dreams. The fact that among Korsakoff's patients stairs appear as a symbol of fornication does not necessarily mean that a staircase is only a symbol of fornication. In the same way that dream work constructs a double history, reflecting both the current organization of events and the vestiges of childhood, dream work could very well construct a triple history in which the "archaic heritage » finds its expression. We could only detect this third story in a dream if we first assume that it actually exists. Literary analysis works in much the same way, in that the critic gives himself a framework. So here is a dream of a staircase taken from Pushkin's play Boris Godunov. The speaker is the protagonist, Grigori, a monk who wonders whether he should give free rein to his ambition to become tsar. I dreamed that a steep staircase led me to the top of a tower; from above All of Moscow appeared to me like an anthill; Below, people swarmed on the square And pointed at me, laughing; And I was ashamed and afraid - And, falling headlong, I am awake...Michael Katz, in his book Dreams and the Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction, obviously suggests that the dream is a "subconscious warning." Grigori will indeed climb the “steep staircase” of the."