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Consider a smoker who says he wants to quit. In a sense, this is crazy. Even if he argues that he can't quit because he is addicted, it would be truer to say that he wants to keep smoking; that he wants to keep smoking because he is addicted. He has two wants: not to smoke, and to smoke. He chooses one as his valid want, a true reflection of himself, and rejects the other as a thing, which is outside himself, a product of the addiction. And yet it is the want he rejects that he acts on.

That is crazy. But it is crazy in a very human way that we all are farmiliar with. We all do this to some extent; we refuse to accept some part of who we are; we invent reasons and excuses for doing what we want to do.

We can think of a person as a collection of parts, of agents, of processes, that communicate with one another well or poorly, that understand or misunderstand one another, that cooperate or sabotage one another. Sometimes a part can become so untethered from the rest of the person, so unaccountable to the others, so ostracized in the mind's senate, that it causes behaviors which the person finds quite mystifying. This extreme case of a semi-autonomous part psychologists call a complex.

There are two reasons for one not to understand one's dreams. One is simply that one does not understand the symbolic language of dreams. The solultion then is to learn it. The other is that one does not want to understand the message. This avoidance causes the dream to be more indirect, more distant psychologically.

When part of oneself is actively denied, it does not vanish -- the desire, the belief, the emotion fueling it remains -- but denied access to consciousness, its thinking degrades, becomes primitive, symbolic, and not well-oriented toward reality. A man who hates his boss may deliberately engage in fantasy about killing him, and thereby cope with feelings of being treated unjustly; but if he cannot first acknowledge the hatred, he may find fantasies and daydreams of a more peculiar kind coming to him spontaneously; he may find his behaviors take an odd slant; and he may have peculiar dreams.

Indirection in dreams tells us the extent to which the dreamer is avoiding the material. It also tells us the power of the material which is denied. The more a person works to avoid the message, the more distasteful it is to them; but in any given dream, that material has nevertheless reached consciousness: so it is at least that strong.

In short, the degree of avoidance tells us the upper bound on how distasteful, hurtful, and so on, conscious representation of the dream material would be, and a lower bound on how strongly the dreamer feels about it. If we could somehow measure the degree of avoidance, the material would be at most that upsetting, and yet it is at least that important to the dreamer.


Posted Anonymously Latest page update: made by Anonymous , Jul 8 2008, 9:51 AM EDT (about this update About This Update Posted Anonymously Edited anonymously

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