Page 138 - Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained Vol. 3

Mysteries of the Mind 119

varied to allow any single, unitary explanation The god Hermes pours
of dreaming to be adequate. sleep into the eyes of
mortals. (GETTY IMAGES)
Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875–
1961), a student and later dissenter of Freudian
techniques, added new dimensions to the
understanding of the self through dreams.
From Jung’s perspective, Freud expressed a
contempt for the psyche as a kind of waste bin
for inappropriate or immoral thoughts. In
Jung’s opinion, the unconscious was far more
than a depository for the past; it was also full of
future psychic situations and ideas. Jung saw
the dream as a compensatory mechanism
whose function was to restore one’s psycholog-
ical balance. His concept of a collective
unconscious linked humans with their ances-
tors as part of the evolutionary tendency of the
human mind. Jung rejected arbitrary interpre-
tations of dreams and dismissed free Freudian
association as wandering too far from the
dream content. Jung developed an intricate
system of “elaborations,” in which the dreamer
relates all that he or she knows about a sym-
bol—as if he or she were explaining it to a visi-
tor from another planet. ego is the “I” within each individual. It is the
thinking, feeling, and aware aspect of self that
Jung found startling similarities in the enables the individual to distinguish himself
unconscious contents and the symbolic or herself from others. In psychoanalytic theo-
processes of both modern and primitive ry, the ego mediates between the more primi-
humans, and he recognized what he called tive drives of the “id,” the unconscious,
“archetypes,” mental forces and symbology instinctual self, and the demands of the social
whose presence cannot be explained by any- environment in which the individual must
thing in the individual’s own life, but seemed function. (Jung saw the self as encompassing
to be “aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes the total psyche, of which the ego is only a
of the human mind.” Jung believed that it is small part.) Jung called this psychic integra-
crucial to pay attention to the archetypes met tion of the personality, this striving toward
in dream life. Of special importance is the wholeness, the process of “individuation.”
“shadow,” a figure of the same sex as the
dreamer, which contains all the repressed char-
acteristics one has not developed in his or her
conscious life. The “anima” is the personifica-
tion of all the female tendencies, both positive MANY authorities consider Dr. Nathaniel
and negative, in the male psyche. Its counter- Kleitman (1895–1999) to be the father of modern
part in the female psyche is the “animus.”
scientific dream research.
The most mysterious, but most significant,
of the Jungian archetypes is the self, which M.
L. von Fram describes in Man and His Symbols
(1964) as the regulating center that brings Many authorities consider Dr. Nathaniel
about a constant expansion and maturing of Kleitman (1895–1999) to be the father of
the personality. The self emerges only when modern scientific dream research, for he pur-
the ego can surrender and merge into it. The sued the subject when his colleagues dismissed

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