In reality - and I confess it with difficulty - I have boundless admiration for you both as a man and as a researcher, and I bear no conscious grudge against your comparisons... My veneration because you have some sort of "religious" crush. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay - Carl Jung, in a letter to Freud, October 28, 1907. A transference on a religious basis would seem to me extremely disastrous; it could only end in apostasy, thanks to the universal human tendency to continue leaving new imprints of the clichés we carry within us. I will do my best to show you that I am not fit to be an object of worship. - Freud to Jung, November 15, 1907 Sigmund Freud wrote copiously, if inconsistently, on the question of dream symbolism. Separating his ideas will reveal their striking similarity to Jung's work on the collective unconscious in dreaming. In this context, how might we understand the two thinkers in relation to each other? But first we need to clarify Freud's use of the term symbol. The manifest content replaces the latent content of a dream. The interpretation simply consists in replacing each manifest image with its determinant. Free association is the primary means of accomplishing this feat. This necessarily implies that a given dream object acts as a representative of an idea that the censorship has carefully excluded from consciousness. Following this logic, the reader should have no difficulty in calling any dream image a symbol.* The very first image analyzed by Freud lends itself to this all-encompassing characterization: "The hall - numerous guests we were receiving. We were spending that summer in Bellevue, a house on one of the hills adjacent to the Kahlenberg... The previous day [before the dream] my wife had told me that she expected that a number of friends, including Irma, would come to visit us on her birthday therefore this opportunity." In the dream itself there are no explicit references to Freud's wife or Bellevue. The room recalls this group of ideas only by association. The disparity between what is intended and what Freud actually sees in his sleep is resolved quite easily into a formula: the hall is the symbol of the birthday party. This quick formula, however, seems to put a lot of pressure on the idea of ​​symbolism. . The tension initially arises because a birthday party seems to have so little importance. A symbol must, we tend to feel, designate a great event, a profound brotherhood, a profound relationship; a cross, a flag, a lock of a lover's hair are the stuff of symbols. But this strict definition is too restrictive for psychoanalysis, which is in part the science that determines what exactly is important. Any page of Freud illustrates the insignificance of the concept of insignificance. Since a birthday celebration can weigh on the psyche more heavily than the Apocalypse, it is clear that a Freudian model of symbolism cannot reject a possible symbol on the grounds that it does not seem to matter enough to us. Freud himself might argue that the hall fails the litmus test for a symbol because it is not sexual in nature (although a hall certainly could be). Summarizing section E ("Representation by Symbols") of the chapter on dream work in Dream Interpretation, he writes in On Dreams that there is only one method by which a dream expressing erotic wishes can manage to appear innocently nonsexual in the its manifest content... Unlike other forms of indirect representation, what is used in thedreams do not have to be immediately intelligible. Modes of representation that satisfy these conditions are usually described as "symbols" of the things they represent. This standard is inconsistent with his use of the term. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he points to baggage as a symbol of "a load of sins", and earlier states that Wilhelm Stekel has clarified our understanding of the "symbolism of death". According to Freud's definition, the expression "death symbolism" is completely incomprehensible, since all symbols are supposed to be sexual. The other point made above by Freud, namely that symbols "need not be immediately intelligible", is itself unintelligible in the context of his method. Some of the associations formulated by Freud are terribly obscure at first glance. The "preparation of propionic acid" is not prima facie proposed as a symbol of Freud's "great prudence"; a large chain of associations is required before the dreamer is allowed to make that connection. Freud confesses that such a bond could be the result of a "far-fetched and senseless chain of thoughts." Therefore neither sexuality nor incomprehensibility is sufficient to distinguish a symbol from a significant (representative) object in a dream. The last conceivable objection to the notion of a "symbolic hall" as described in Irma's injection dream is that this particular representation is not common enough to be considered a symbol. Everyone knows what the Cross symbolizes, while only Freud knows the meaning of the hall. Indeed, the commonality or sheer popularity of a representation is what Freud assumes makes a symbol a symbol, despite having explicitly written to the contrary. There is no other possible explanation for the statement that "rooms represent women" and "stairs or going upstairs represent sexual intercourse", while "propionic acid" only reaches the rank of "substitution", as well as the fact that stairs and rooms work their magic on an almost universal scale. Freud, however, tries to make it perfectly clear that some "symbols [are] constructed by an individual from his own ideational material." However, examples of this kind do not exist in the Interpretation of Dreams. If a symbol could emerge from the dreamer's personal "ideational material", symbolism would no longer be a device for dream interpretation or "folk myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom [or] running jokes." And above all, symbolism is an expedient, a trick, a ready-made explanation. In the opening passages of Representation by Symbols, Freud offers us an explanation of our dreams without asking us to sit on his couch to fight resistant associations. Symbols “fill the gap,” so to speak, when “the dreamer's free associations leave us in the lurch.” This presents a problem. Indeed, if Freud wants us to believe that a symbol can transcend the dreamer's associations, doesn't he then suggest that the formation of a symbol is fundamentally different from the formation of a non-symbolic dream object, such as propionic acid? Freud's recommendation of a "combined technique" that attacks latent content by relying on both the "dreamer's associations" and the "interpreter's knowledge of symbols" raises this question. Starting from the assumption that one can analyze a certain part of a dream without reference to the dreamer's associations, he postulates the difficult idea that the content of a dream can be determined in part by something other than the dreamer's experience. In short, the existence of symbols (in the sense in which Freud actually uses the term) requires that there exists some sort of “unconsciouscollective” floating in some transcendental psychic realm? The first time Freud addresses the question of symbol formation, in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology", he refers to such a strange and seemingly unscientific abstraction: "[T]here occurred an event which consisted of B+ A. A was an accidental circumstance; B was appropriate to produce the lasting effect. The reproduction of this event in memory has now taken such a form that, as if A had come into place of B, A has become a substitute, a symbol of B. The mechanism is as individual as digestion. A is associated in the mind with the more important B"accidental circumstance", and therefore A represents B. This simple, almost Pavlovian model anticipates Freud's later explanation of our need to disguise specifically the erotic/traumatic content: it certainly has a "longer lasting effect", as he says, if we follow the model to the letter, we once again find ourselves having to label personal dream images such as propionic acid as symbols. So this first attempt to explain the mechanism of symbol formation, although prophetic to some extent, is not particularly useful. There is no hint of the sameness across personal boundaries that comes to define symbolism. Is it possible, however, to expand this model so that uniformity can be accounted for? If A were to occur to everyone who experiences B, then we could easily do without the uncomfortable idea of ​​a “collective unconscious” or “intrinsic meaning.” Freud in fact suggests something along these lines in explaining why a scale - one example out of a hundred - comes to denote sexual intercourse. He writes in his essay "Future Prospects of Psychoanalysis" that "the rhythmic pattern of coupling", i.e. B in the model, "is reproduced by climbing the stairs", i.e. A. The linguistic explanation of the symbolism of the staircase fits the model in psychoanalysis the same way. All Germans "incidentally" associate climbing stairs or mounting ("steigen") with sexual mounting ("Steiger"), so to speak. In English, the relationship is more or less analogous: in slang, we do "mount", or get on board. Common experience seen in this light is neither profound nor confusing. It is simply the sum of personal, linguistic or physical experiences. The formation of symbolism is then returned to the individual. This easy explanation, however, does not agree with a surprising statement by Freud, to which the expression "combined technique" alluded earlier, namely that the symbols used in the dream work are completely unknown to the dreamer. This meaning must be unknown, otherwise there is no reason for the dreamer's associations, or lack thereof, to leave the interpretation "in the lurch." The B+A model necessarily implies that the dreamer can come to understand the meaning of any symbol through a basic associative chain: A ladder - rhythm of steps - rhythm of the body - up, up, up - sexual intercourse. Here resistance does not block revelation, because only unconscious knowledge can be resisted. There is no knowledge here, in the conventional sense of the term. The dreamer does not know in any way that the stairs are sex. Yet they are. There is therefore a fundamental contradiction. It is impossible for the dreamer to be completely unaware of the equation he is actually using. He must know somehow. We're stuck. The way out of this quagmire is, in fact, that otherworldly demon, the questionable prehistory of the psyche, the collective unconscious, as Jung will later call it. Now completely impersonal knowledge is possible. In fact, here, as Freud writes in his essay "Outlines of Psychoanalysis", published posthumously, a certain "material" is accessible which cannot come from eitheradult life of the dreamer nor from his forgotten childhood. We are obliged to consider it as part of the archaic heritage that the child brings with him into the world, before any of his experiences, influenced by the experiences of his ancestors... Thus dreams constitute a source of human prehistory that is not to be despised. It is no coincidence that Freud wrote this surprising, and perhaps anti-Freudian, passage at the very end of his career. He had only hinted at this bizarre idea in The Interpretation of Dreams, writing that "those things that are symbolically connected today were probably united in prehistoric times by a conceptual and linguistic identity." But this confusing phrase does not require us to accept the borderline mystical idea of ​​knowledge before experience. Our ancestors may have simply climbed the same stairs we do today. In 1900 a Freudian could still hold fast to the lovely A+B model. By 1940, the astonishing frequency with which the same symbol had visited unrelated dreamers, often "extending beyond the use of common language", suggested to Freud something deeper than a simple pattern of experience. If Dora of Vienna and Jacob of Genesis can imagine such a similar picture, then there must be a "human prehistory." Suddenly, Freud seems like a Jungian. Indeed, the similarities between the late Freud and his greatest dissident Jung are striking. Jung defines the collective unconscious as "the reservoir of latent memory traces inherited from man's ancestral past, a past that includes not only man's racial history as a separate species but also his prehuman or animal ancestors." Freud's "archaic history" and Jung's "ancestral past" differ in diction, not in essence. Both assume that a child can somehow inherit memories and experiences. The non-believer might attempt to reconcile this notion with conventional scientific (or Freudian) thinking by arguing that we have inherited only the predisposition to represent ideas as our ancestors did, in much the same way that we probably tend to appreciate types of foods similar. . This response avoids the problem only because it does not address it; The unconscious "material" and the "memory traces" are certainly not predispositions. However the two thinkers differed dramatically on the theory of dreams. Jung had the advantage of basing his most innovative work on the "personal unconscious" on what he knew of the collective unconscious, while Freud focused his energies on common, perhaps universal, childhood stories. Therefore Jung may see a dream of stairs or ladders as symbolic of a drama that has its roots in a land far more fertile than the narrow swamp of our unfulfilled sexual desires. In his essay "The Symbolism of the Individual Dream in Relation to Alchemy", in which he attempts to situate the unconscious of a particular individual in relation to the collective, Jung analyzes the following dream: "A dangerous walk with father and mother, up and down many stairs." We know right away what Freud would think. A ladder is "analogous" to a ladder and therefore performs the same symbolic function: copulation. He would regard the "danger" as a manifestation of the fear of incest, the "ups and downs" as the fulfillment of infantile desire. Regarding the supposedly bisexual element of the dream ("Father and Mother"), Freud would certainly postulate volumes of conjecture. Jung is a little more poetic: "Regression [in this case, to mother and father] means the disintegration of our historical and hereditary determinants, and it is only with the greatest effort that we can free ourselves from their embrace. Our psychic prehistory it is in truth the spirit of gravity, which needs steps and ladders because, unlike the aerial intellectdisembodied, cannot fly at will." If we accept the collective unconscious, there is absolutely no reason not to follow Jung in seeing "regression" as a regression to our primordial roots, since "every man, in a certain sense, represents the whole of humanity and its history". Why stop at childhood, when another important evolutionary stage is hidden before childhood? The Freud who wrote The Interpretation of Dreams would undoubtedly see this Jungian analysis as a mystical nonsense, not as a regression to a psychic prehistory but rather "to the technique of interpretation used by the ancients, for whom the interpretation of dreams was identical to the interpretation by symbols." hypothetical criticism. The question of proof certainly looms over Jung's complicated analysis. How does he know that a ladder represents the vicissitudes of the individual unconscious as it struggles to escape its "hereditary determinants"? At least Freud can support his formulas by referring, for example, to an experiment by Betlheim and Hartmann (1924), in which Korsakoff's patients who were told "grossly sexual" stories substituted stairs (or shootings or stabbings) for intercourse sexual when they reproduced those stories. Jung instead relies completely on context, the broadest conceivable context. “Scientific knowledge,” he rightly argues, “satisfies only the small tip of the personality that is contemporary with ourselves, not the collective psyche.” He must always convince us of the preponderance of the evidence, while Freud can cite scientific works. Jung, however, can claim coherence. He integrates the collective unconscious and even telepathy into his theory of dreams. Freud's last-minute revision condemns him to inconsistency, as he never refers to pre-life experience when analyzing any dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams. The fact that stairs emerge as a symbol of fornication in Korsakoff patients does not necessarily mean that a staircase is only a symbol of fornication. In the same way that the dream work constructs a double history, which reflects both the current organization of events and the remnants of childhood, the dream work could well construct a triple history in which the "archaic legacy" finds expression. This third story could only be discovered in a dream if one assumed in advance that it actually exists. Literary analysis works in much the same way, insofar as the critic assumes structure. So here is a dream staircase from Pushkin's opera Boris Godunov. The speaker is the protagonist, Grigory, a monk who wonders whether he should give free rein to his ambition to become tsar. I dreamed that a steep staircase led me up a tower; from above, all of Moscow appeared to me like an anthill; below, people swarmed in the square and pointed at me, laughing; and I was ashamed and afraid - and falling headlong I woke up... Michael Katz, in his book Dreams and the Unconscious in Fiction 19th century Russian, obviously suggests that the dream is a "subconscious warning". Grigory will in fact climb the "steep staircase" of politics up to the castle: he will become the tsar. Katz sees the beginning of the "fall" foreshadowed in the last scene of the play.* This is a possible story. A Freudian analysis might equate the "steep staircase" with the "headlong fall." Going up alone, the celibate Grigory masturbates effectively, releasing his long-accumulated excitement. For a monk, such pleasure would in fact imply a fall (and therefore "shame"), a tenuous connection that Freud readily makes in The Interpretation of Dreams. The fact that he wakes up immediately after falling identifies it as an anxiety dream, which "represents a wish."