Sept 2014
Re-landscaping
the Self through Dream Work by Dr
Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Years ago, when I was briefly married to a Jungian
analyst, I had a recurring dream. It was a strange dream because it happened on
the 10th November every year and involved me reaching for the moon and flying there. Because I was a
Jungian analyst-in-training and not then Narrative Therapy oriented (this was
before Narrative Therapy had been formulated), I looked for symbolic meaning
and not emotional intent. I never truly understood the dream, until recently.
It finally dawned on me that my dreams were nothing but wish fulfilment and
that I desired to move beyond my somewhat limited and limiting circumstance. I
did not fit marriage to this man and needed to leave in order to re-landscape
myself, that is find myself.
When I left him I entered a rather dark, dank swamp
land and wandered from plains to projects, through religious ideas, to
scientific endeavour (I was briefly enrolled in medical school), to research and
editing projects, to academic study in university and its very verdant,
colourful, lush and exciting landscape. I engaged in my philosophical and
psychological doctoral work, tutored and lectured, rented houses and built
gardens and fish ponds, and started knowing who I was. (I finished my PhD,
coincidentally, on 10th of November, 2001!) And then my interest
perked up again and I trained, once again, in the tools of the trade as a
counsellor, psychotherapist and then clinical hypnotherapist.
These were intense years of personal change. I went
from being a scared, timid sort of woman to quite fearless, ready to experiment
and explore and confront almost anything. I scuba dived out at sea, talked to
people – roomfuls of them, sang in groups of three, performed on my cello,
hanged up on telemarketers and other nuisance makers and I learned to listen to and speak my truth, even when I
was the only dissenter in a group.
I did not do this alone, all the way, but had the
assistance, when I needed it, of courageous fellow travellers in the form of
therapists, friends, and seers. The “reading” of dreams remained a most
valuable tool in my self discovery.
Recently, I have begun thinking about what I learned
those years ago at the (Jung) Institute for Analytical Psychology in Zurich in
the 1970s, and before that, from a mentor and teacher of mine, at Curtin
University, Perth, and from even that husband of mine, and books, and films,
and thoughts over the years, and I realize that I was trying to understand
Jung’s ideas as dogma, and not as emergent ideas that Jung sought to make sense
of. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and a shaper of many
ideas we continue to explore today: the collective unconscious, archetypes,
dream work, personality types, and so on.
Most of those I’d listened to had taken aboard a dogma without much
examination, nor critique, and it felt cozy and comfortable. Germans have a
word for it, Gemütlichkeit, which means, a situation which induces a cheerful mood, peace of mind, comfy-ness, belonging and social
acceptance, coziness and unhurry. In fact, what I had tried to take in was a
trance state. A voice of disquiet hung around me for many years and I was
afraid to speak it aloud.
The other day, I
watched an early documentary on Jung’s explorations among peoples in Africa and
the Native American Taos pueblo in New Mexico where he listened to and asked
questions and kept asking questions through letters with the people he’d spent
time with, of their dreams. He spoke with Black American patients in
psychiatric hospitals and listened to their retelling of their dreams. He asked
a question nobody else had, “Are the dreams of diverse people similar or
dissimilar across cultures?” He came to realize we all dream rather similarly.
It was from this observation that he began formulating his concept of the
collective unconscious. He noticed
patterns emerging among the dreamscape materials and identified personalities,
personas, events, figures, and forms that seemed to be consistent among all
people. These, he identified as “archetypes”.
Archetypes are
not set but patterns in process. They are potentials only, and while Jung
identified a few: archetypal events: birth, death, separation from parents,
initiation, marriage, the union of opposites, archetypal figures: great mother,
father, child,
devil, god, wise old man, wise old woman, the trickster, and the hero, and archetypal
motifs: the apocalypse, the deluge, and the creation, there are probably
thousands more.
Archetypes are
not actual anything. They describe only a clustering of ideas around events in
stories (literature, movies, dramas) and dreams. Furthermore, the aim of
identifying archetypes is not the purpose of understanding stories, however
interesting that might be, and however much we, as a culture, have formalized
such an activity; we need, I believe, to pay attention to what actually matters
to us, what emotional climate there is in the dream, what the dream evokes for
us, and how the dream may help us unleash unexplored parts of ourselves. This
means paying attention to the dream and the stories we live by (and each of us
do this), and not flipping open a dictionary of dreams to hunt down archetypal
images. We are called to our own self actualization and potential, not to a
doctrine of ideas. This means bringing conscious attention to our uniqueness,
in the landscape we individually occupy, while certainly giving interest to our
social belonging. We are born individually, and so are called to be the best
version of ourselves we can be. To come to know this is a conscious process and
thus it very useful indeed in understanding what stories we’ve constructed
around ourselves and seek to move into landscapes of our minds that truly
nurture rather than limit us.
