A Discovery of Meaning: The Case of C. G. Jung's House Dream

Abstract

Jung's work is a serious attempt to engage psychology with `meaning', comparable with narrative psychology, though the two emerged in different cultural and historical settings. Whereas narrative psychologists typically study autobiographical stories, Jung studied images such as those appearing in dreams and myths. This study turns the question on Jung, examining a dream that he had regarded as the birth moment of his `collective unconscious' theory. The dream's contents vary when retold after many years in ways that mirror the interim development of his theory. Representations of the dream as a biographical event in others' writings reflect contrasting attitudes towards him. His use of the dream's image as heuristic in the dissemination of his theory is counterweighted by the dream's effect on him as a poetic image. The psychological function of the image for Jung is considered.

Jung, History and His Approach to the Psyche

“…The house dream, Jung concludes, obviously points to "the foundations of cultural history-a history of successive layers of consciousness" (ibid.). In retrospect, the dream (regardless of whether it was merely a reconstructed fantasy serving a specific purpose [Jones, 2007]) is an intuition pivotal to the foundations of Jung's psychology, one that would be corroborated throughout the course of his work. 7 "It was my first inkling," he recalls, "of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche" (Jung, 1961(Jung, /1989.…”

Reconceptualizing Dreamwork (With Apologies yo Lewis Carroll’s "Alice") as a Facet of Motherwork

“…While Blass (2002: 103) has categorically insisted that "dream work is, and can be nothing but, the various rules that Freud devised and used as he applied his technique of dream interpretation," it appears likely that Freud, himself, might have been startled by what his tropology of dreamwork has inspired and by how it has been adopted, adapted and deployed by scholars in a wide variety of fields including aesthetics, cultural studies, hermeneutics, linguistics, and poetics and rhetoric (Civitarese 2006;Ferro 2006;Gane 2006;Hoeveler 2006;Mahon 2007). Moreover, while many in the caring professions do continue to pay explicit homage to Freud in their writings on dreamwork, at least some would seem more obviously inspired by the theories of Carl Jung or Alfred Adler or Fritz Perls or Aaron Beck (Amendt-Lyons 2004;Bird 2005;Davis and Hill 2005;Jones 2007;Litowitz 2007). In other disciplines, even greater eclecticism may be evinced in charting a genealogy of dreamwork, with new lines of descent proposed that would, for example, give greater prominence to the historical Weber rather than the ahistorical Freud (Gerona 2004) or direct pointed attention to Plato's Republic and his characterization therein of science's work as dreamwork (Franchi 2005: 99).…”

The cryptomnesic origins of Jung's dream of the multi‐storeyed house

“…For 18 months prior to the dream, Jung had been working on the design and construction of his new house in Küsnacht (Bair 2004, p. 124). In later years Jung also observed that the dream house bore some similarity to his uncle's house (Jones 2007, p. 211). And in Man and His Symbols he also alludes to a similarity between the dream house and the house he ‘grew up in’ (Jung 1964, p. 43).…”

“…Raya Jones has traced the morphology of Jung's accounts of the dream, between 1925 and 1961, arguing that the story was reconstructed in retrospect to mirror the development of Jung's thought. She doubts the fidelity of the account to the dream because it is ‘the end product of protracted poetic labour … he confused his early imaginative creation with the dream itself’ (Jones 2007, p. 209):…”