Chapter One

INTRODUCTION TO CLINICAL
DREAM INTERPRETATION

Every interpretation is an hypothesis, an attempt to read an

unknown text. (lung, Collected Works, 16, para. 322, hereinafter
referred to as CW.)
One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a
totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your
hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play around
with it.
(CW, 10, para. 320)

This book is intended as an introductory guidebook for psychoanalysts

and therapists who seek to integrate a basic approach to dream inter-
pretation into their clinical practice. It is a practical primer for the analyst-
in-training, growing out of a need for such a handbook, perceived as
we endeavored to teach dream interpretation at the C. G. Jung Institute
in New York. Its aims are modest. It barely touches on the rich
philosophical issues raised by dreaming and fantasy. I It does not deal
with material on comparative approaches to dream interpretation as this
craft is practiced among the different schools of modern western
psychotherapy.2 Nor does it deal with the research coming from the
laboratories on the necessity and patterns of REM sleep.3
This experimental material supports Jung's views that dreaming
processes are undistorted and purposeful, having the goal of synthesiz-
ing experience4 into images in meaningful and creative ways. They
enhance learning and assist in the completion of individual development.
Our approach, indeed, owes most to the seminal work of Carl G.
Jung. His insights have been personally clarified and extended through
years of clinical work and teaching by subsequent practitioners. For the
most part, regrettably, this work has not been summarized and pub-
lished. 5 Many others, including writers of various 'schools' of
 INTRODUCTION

psychology, colleagues, analysands, students, and friends, have con-

tributed to our understanding as well. The bibliography gives only some
idea of our debt. To all of them we are grateful.

The dream itself is a natural and necessary expression of the life

force 6 - one that manifests in sleeping consciousness and is sometimes
remembered and recounted 7 across the threshold of waking. 8 Like a
flower or a hurricane or a human gesture, its basic purpose is the
manifestation and expression of this life force. It gives us images of
energy, synthesizing past and present, personal and collective
experiences.
I With 'interpretation' we do not mean a mere translation of nightworld
visions into dayworld consciousness. Not only is such tidy dualism an
artifact in psychology as in physics, but we are coming increasingly to
realize that it is not necessary. Just as REM processes serve to integrate
complex information below the threshold of awareness, so dayworld con-
sciousness is infused and structured by images which render it
meaningful. Indeed, we are coming increasingly to realize that -
although dreaming and the verbal telling of the dream are localized in
different areas of the brain9 - 'dreaming and waking partake of the
same reality, which is both spiritual and physical.'10 Both states can be
understood from a variety of perspectives, and both can be read
metaphorically or symbolically.
The dream as a whole may have many human 'uses.' Like the water
in a stream dipped up in cups and used for cooking or for quenching
thirst, channeled in sluices and pipes and used for turning water mills
or filling swimming pools and flushing toilets. It can be left alone in
its streambed and looked at quietly, thereby 'used' for rest or boating,
for contemplation, or for stimulating the reflective streams of art. So
energy flowing into dream images can have many uses. Among them
the dream can be used for providing access into unconscious areas of
life, for providing specific and appropriately timed messages of many
kinds which can assist the dreamer with problem solving,l1 artistic
inspiration, psychological development, and spiritual deepening. As one
commentator put it, 'The superordinate function of dreams is the
development, maintenance (regulation), and, when necessary, restora-
tion of psychic processes, structures, and organization.'12
The dream can, thus, also be used for healing. As it holds up to con-
sciousness metaphors and symbols of the unceasing energy flow,
sustaining and shaping personal life, it shows the underlying patterns

2
 INTRODUCTION

with which, for the sake of our health, we need to be in more conscious
relationship. Equally, it shows also images of those mis-constellated
patterns into which our personal lives are inevitably bent. The flowing
interplay between these healing and 'dis-eased' patterns can provide
inestimable guidance for the process of psychotherapy.
To the therapist, each dream reveals messages about psychic struc-
tures or complexes of the dreamer intrapsychically in past and present.
It also conveys information about the dreamer's relations to others on
whom those structures and complexes are projected. Each dream tells
the clinician about psychological dynamics, developmental patterns and
capacities. It also images the dreamer's relations to the spiritual dimen-
sion, to the Self and to archetypal patterns and energies. The dreamer
and his or her therapist may seek to learn from all of these levels about
hitherto unknown aspects of personal and transpersonal existence.
To approach dream interpretation adequately we need to find perspec-
tives beyond those created by dualistic consciousness, which rests content
with oppositions - exterior/interior, object/subject, day/night, life/death,
functional-descriptive/imaginal, focused attention/openness, etc. While
these opposites are valuable for defining rational awareness, we need
also to develop an integrative consciousness 13 that can read both daily
and nightly actions and events and nightly and daily visions from many
perspectives and to integrate these perspectives for ourselves and the
patient-dreamer before us in our consulting rooms. This capacity relies
on an ability to shift between the many forms of magic-affective, body,
mythological, allegoric, symbolic, and rational awareness. By developing
these modes, or particular styles of consciousness, it becomes possible
to shift between them just as we seek to shift from one situationally rele-
vant typological function to another. Thus we may gain the fullest possible
range of perspectives on the psychological significance of a given situa-
tion - be it an event or a dream or a dream event.
To use a comparable but simplified analogy of the possibilities of this
multifaceted approach from daily life, we can consider a red spot on
a tree: it can be viewed as a physical object with a specific physical purpose
(a road marker), as a focus of action or attention or emotion, as a spot
in a visual pattern, as a metaphoric or symbolic message, as an instigator
of memory images, as a revelation of properties of energy bound into
its molecules, as the expression of somebody's fantasy (a remnant of
a picture somebody was trying to paint). It can even be perceived as
a part of a color scheme among the forest greens. It can be functional
in all these forms of awareness - and others. To investigate it

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 INTRODUCTION

properly, the investigator would need to be open to all of these possibilities

and to discover which of them happen to be most applicable to the given
situation.
To relate adequately to the dream, we need, then, the capacity to
circumambulate it from many points of view. As Jung put it: 'In order
to do anything like justice to dreams, we need an interpretive equip-
ment that must be laboriously fitted together from all branches of the
human sciences.' 14 And, we would add, from the arts and spiritual
outlooks as well.
This book is an attempt to bring some of this rich diversity of approach
- and the capacity to play back and forth among the approaches -
to the attention of the therapist, who can then begin to use them for
the sake of exploring the various levels and meanings of each dream.
We focus specifically on:
(1) the symbolic and metaphoric/allegoric language of dream images;
(2) dream imagery related to personal associative material, rational and
collective explanatory material, and mythological amplificatory
material;
(3) various relations between the dream and the dreamer's conscious
positions;
(4) the dream's dramatic structure;
(5) the dream's depictions of the relations between healing archetypal
image and personal experience;
(6) body imagery in dreams; and
(7) dream images of analyst and analysis as material revealing the
transferential and countertransferential relationship.
All of these areas need to be held hovering in the therapist's consciousness
as clinical dream interpretative work proceeds. Indeed, this book could
be read as a circle, each chapter providing a way station from which
to focus on the dream, which lies at its center.