Embodied Imagination: Robert Bosnak,at 57

Robert Bosnak is a Dutch Jungian psychoanalyst and cofounder of http://www.cyberdreamwork.com, the first global interactive dream site using real-time voice and video. He is past president of the Association for the Study of Dreams and author of A Little Course in Dreams, Christopher's Dreams: Dreaming and Living with AIDS, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, and his new book Embodied Imagination: In Medicine, Art, and Travel. In this interview Robert Bosnak shares his perspectives and experiences as a Jungian analyst and in his studies of healing, shamanism, dreams, and alchemy. We also discuss his unique embodied approach to dream work.     

The interpretation of dreams a classic revisited

In this centenary of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams it is important to revisit this classic, to discuss why it is a classic, to consider what has been learned since its publication, and to discuss what changes in our understanding of dreams and dreaming are called for. To this end, we briefly discuss some of the main themes of the book. Then we review both changes in psychoanalytic thinking and theory and the results of many studies made possible by the discovery of the electro‐encephalographic changes that occur during sleep and their relevance for understanding dreams and their function. We suspect that Freud would have been delighted to know about this explosion of information about the physiology of dreaming. With this in mind, we consider the need for modification of some of Freud's theories while noting that his basic contribution, that dreams are meaningful and understandable, has been amply confirmed. We then discuss these observations in relation to how we approach working with dreams.     

Oneiric activity and the analytical process A semiotic perspective on Willy Baranger's theory of dreams1

This author reconsiders, from a semiotic perspective, the theoretical and technical ideas developed by Willy and Madeleine Baranger, especially W. Baranger's views on the function of dreams, the status of oneiric symbols and the further clinical‐technical use of dreams in the context of the intersubjective dynamic fi eld, together with the basic unconscious fantasy that emerges in the analytic situation. She attempts to relate the Barangers' ideas to others arising from Peirce's analytic semiotics that would support a triadic conceptualization of dreams. The need to incorporate a pragmatic view of communication and of the processes of production of sense as contributions to dream metapsychology and interpretation in the case of non‐neurotic patients is particularly emphasized. On the basis of the hypothesis of a described series of triads underlying the production and retelling of dreams, the acknowledgment of these produced/told dreams as intentional signs allows the presence of a continuous process of semiosis to be proposed. The author introduces clinical material to illustrate the communicative value of dreams through the textual analysis of the report and accompanying associations of three dreams. Such analysis takes a linguistic pragmatics approach that examines those aspects of meaning not accounted for by a restricted semantic theory.     

Freud,Bion and Kant: Epistemology and anthropology in The Interpretation of Dreams

This interdisciplinary article takes a philosophical approach to The Interpretation of Dreams, connecting Freud to one of the few philosophers with whom he sometimes identified – Immanuel Kant. It aims to show that Freud's theory of dreams has more in common with Bion's later thoughts on dreaming than is usually recognized. Distinguishing, via a discussion of Kant, between the conflicting ‘epistemological’ and ‘anthropological’ aspects of The Interpretation of Dreams, it shows that one specific contradiction in the book – concerning the relation between dream‐work and waking thought – can be understood in terms of the tension between these conflicting aspects. Freud reaches the explicit conclusion that the dream‐work and waking thought differ from each other absolutely; but the implicit conclusion of The Interpretation of Dreams is quite the opposite. This article argues that the explicit conclusion is the result of the epistemological aspects of the book; the implicit conclusion, which brings Freud much closer to Bion, the result of the anthropological approach. Bringing philosophy and psychoanalysis together this paper thus argues for an interpretation of The Interpretation of Dreams that is in some ways at odds with the standard view of the book, while also suggesting that aspects of Kant's ‘anthropological’ works might legitimately be seen as a precursor of psychoanalysis.     

Extreme Traumatisation: Strategies for Mental Survival

Sincerity: a Study in the Atmosphere of Human Relations, a previously unpublished book, appearing in D. Meltzer's Collected Papers, explores The Dwarfs, The Birthday Party and The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, both the capacity to communicate genuine emotion and its limitation by the subject's inability to say-what-he-means, because of rigidity and coldness, and to mean-what-he-says, because of an integrated narcissistic structure. That the language of dreams is perhaps the lingua franca of emotionality and the key to aesthetics is the book's conclusion, with a clear indication of the books to come. This article surveys the relevance of the notion of sincerity in Meltzer's further work, in its clinical and metapsychological aspects.     

Intentionality Analysis and the Problem of Self and Other

Dennett recounts an alarm clock dream which he experienced as taking a long time even though the alarm presumably sounded for only a short time. His explanation of this paradoxical behavior of time in dreams is that there actually is no dream experience but that unexperienced dreams are composed directly into memory banks and are subsequently played back on awakening. I critique Dennett's theory of dreams in Heideggerian terms on the grounds that he takes temporality in a common-sense superficial way. I review Heidegger's theory of time and using Dennett's own dream show that “temporality temporalizes itself' in dreams too as a free production of dreaming Dasein. Dream time is what dreaming temporality produces whatever the clocks of waking show, and is entirely consistent with authentic dream experience. An appreciation of the process of dreaming temporality temporalizing itself supports Heidegger's concept of temporality as an a priori of Dasein's Being.     

The divine dreams of a sample of South African children: the gateway to their spirituality

As part of a research project on religion, spirituality and education, the authors attended to the role that children's divine dreams could play in religious education (RE). They contend that such dreams can indeed be used by RE teachers as the gateway to understanding the spirituality of their learners. They defend their claim by firstly developing a conceptual‐theoretical framework with respect to religion, spirituality and children's divine dreams, and then presenting the results of an explorative quantitative‐qualitative investigation in three schools. They find their claim to have been vindicated, and suggest that although RE teachers should not necessarily teach divine dreams per se, they should, nevertheless, explore the possibility that (at least some of) the contents of children's divine dreams may be useful for the purpose of teaching them RE from religion itself, rather than teaching them only about religion.     

Henry M. Sheffer and Notational Relativity

Charles L. Dodgson's reputation as a significant figure in nineteenth-century logic was firmly established when the philosopher and historian of philosophy William Warren Bartley, III published Dodgson's ‘lost’ book of logic, Part II of Symbolic Logic, in 1977. Bartley's commentary and annotations confirm that Dodgson was a superb technical innovator. In this paper, I closely examine Dodgson's methods and their evolution in the two parts of Symbolic Logic to clarify and justify Bartley's claims. Then, using more recent publications and unpublished letters, I argue that Dodgson approached the elimination problem in class logic differently than his contemporaries, and in doing so, anticipated several important concepts and techniques in automated deductive reasoning. These materials also provide additional insight into his reasons for writing this book.     

“Jung Has Always Seemed Like an Old Friend”: An Encounter with Claire Dunne

This article provides an account of a visit with the author of a very popular Jungian book, Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul, in which the interviewer relates his conversation with Claire Dunne about her relationship with Jung and how she got involved in Jungian psychology. She also discusses the workshops she has done around the world and the fascinating dreams she has had of Jung.     

Full and empty spaces in the analytic process2

In this paper the author discusses two categories of patients which differ in terms of the impact they have in the countertransference. On the one hand, there are patients who create an empty space in the analyst's mind. The response they provoke is a kind of depressive feeling that remains after they leave. The patient may bring dreams and associations, but they do not reverberate in the analyst's mind. The experience is of dryness, a dearth of memory, which may‐at times‐leave the analyst with a sense of exclusion from the patient's internal world. At the other extreme, there are patients who fill the consulting room. They do that with their words, dreams and associations but also with their emotions and their actions. The experience is that the analyst is over‐included in the patient's world. They have dreams that directly refer to the analyst and the analyst feels consistently involved in the patient's analysis. The pathway through which the analyst can understand both these types of patients is via the countertransference or, to put it another way, the analyst's passion. In ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’ Freud suggested that the bedrock of any analysis is the repudiation of femininity. The author believes this statement may be viewed as lying at the crossroads of the discussion about the limits of the theoretical and clinical psychoanalytic formulations which she refers to. In the examples presented the author relates the repudiation of femininity in its connections to the gaps implicit in psychoanalytic understanding.     

The neglected object: A history of the concept of dreams in Polish psychiatry and psychology in the interwar period, 1918–1939

The development of the concept of dreams in interwar Polish psychiatry and psychology was influenced by Western European concepts as well as by sociocultural factors of the newly independent state. Few Polish psychiatrists addressed the subject of dreams. They were influenced mainly by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of dreams, but also by Alferd Adler's, Carl Gustav Jung's, and Wilhelm Stekel's ideas. Nevertheless, they approached psychoanalysis critically. The most comprehensive concept of dreams in Polish psychiatry was oneiroanalysis by Tadeusz Bilikiewicz. Oneironalysis was a method of dream analysis based on psychoanalysis but it rejected the psychoanalytic method of free associations and challenged psychoanalytic approaches to the interpretation of dream symbols. Polish psychologists were even less interested in dreams than psychiatrists. Problems with dreams, the most elaborate psychological work by Stefan Szuman consisted of an outline of epistemological problems with general theories of dreams and a harsh critique of psychoanalysis. The neglect of the subject of dreams in Polish psychiatric society can be seen as connected with the social and professional reception of psychoanalysis in Poland. Psychoanalysis was met with opposition from conservative scholars and publicists presenting nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes. It was also criticized by the biologically oriented majority of psychiatrists of the Polish Psychiatric Association. In the case of psychology, the most influential Polish psychological school, Lvov-Warsaw School, promoted Brentanian intentionalism, introspection, and psychology of consciousness, therefore, leading to psychologists' reluctance to explore unconscious states like dreams.     

Humanism and Theoretical Pluralism

Christian Smith's What Is a Person? calls for a normative turn in sociology—the grounding of sociology in a theory of human nature. While offering a systematic account of a thick view of personhood—what it should look like, how it can be applied, and why it is needed—the book proposes a critical realist personalism as the best metatheoretical direction for sociology. The author of this essay agrees with the main questions and direction of Smith's project. However, by historicizing the origins and sociological implications of personalist moral theory, the author problematizes the personalism that is one of the foundations of Smith's project. She contrasts personalism with humanism, suggesting that the latter might possess both the normative robustness and comparative potential needed for contemporary sociological theory and practice. She ends her response to Smith's book by raising questions about the relationship between critical realist personalism and theoretical pluralism.     

The Genocidal Islamophobia of a Late Nineteenth-Century French Anti-Semite: D. Kimon and The Pathology of Islam

This article contributes to the study of the image of Islam among French anti-Semites at the end of the nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses D. Kimon's book La pathologie de l'islam, in which the author advocates the need to destroy Islam by annihilating one-twentieth of the world's Muslim population and subjecting the rest to a regime of semi-slavery until they finally convert to Catholicism. Various issues are analysed in the course of this case study: the attitude of anti-Semites towards ethno-cultural groups other than Jews, specifically Muslims; the relationship between anti-Semitism and racism; and the relationship between Islamophobia and racism.     

Who is my Jung? A personal and symbolic history

Identifying the reality of Jung in my life requires first of all a historical examination. How Jung first came into my life through my reading a book by P.W.Martin, Experiment in Depth, stands as a metaphor for the conscious unravelling of psychological development. His further appearance in a sequence of dreams demonstrated the significance of both the instinctual and the numinous in Jung's life and in my personal individuation. Finally, through a consideration of light and shadow, particularly in two photographs of Jung, a conclusion is reached that individuation requires an integration of shadow in the personality, in order to achieve wholeness, not perfection.     

Resistance in treatment as a means of avoiding inner conflict

It is not commonly known that, in his eighties, Michael Fordham sought the help of Donald Meltzer in what Dr Meltzer described as ‘more a weekly supervision of dreams than an analysis’. Dr Fordham is said to have commented that it was ‘a weekly supervision of my inner world - and you can't get closer to psychoanalysis than that’ He was greatly helped by these ‘supervisions’ and at the end of their work together, Meltzer suggested that Fordham wrote his memoirs. This resulted in The Making of an Analyst: Michael Fordham, published in 1993.

This fascinating account of Fordham's life and work contains much of interest about his personal development. He talks with candour about his confusions and passions in what is at times a surprisingly revealing manner. In particular Fordham talks openly about his closest relationships and how they affected him. The book was published, as he wanted it to be, after careful discussion with James Astor and Karl Figlio.

We are pleased to be able to publish the following contribution from Dr Meltzer about the book which he prompted. It is a mixture of personal responses on reading the book and memories of the man.     

Darkness Into Light: The Dream Journal of an Addicted Trauma Survivor

The author applied dream work to the case of an addicted survivor of sexual abuse trauma using models of C. G. Jung (1974) and L. S. Leonard (1989). The dreams of the fictional client were then related to St. Teresa of Avila's (1577/1989) classic model for spiritual growth, The Interior Castle.     

The Dread of Falling—Between Breaking One's Back and Breaking Through: Commentary on Franco Borgogno's “On the Patient's Becoming an Individual”

In response to Franco Borgogno's article, the author talks about the dread of falling, a theme that appears in some of the dreams presented in Borgogno's case study and that conceals very primitive anxieties, each resulting from specific object relations constellations. The discussion elaborates the understanding of this dread through various theoretical perspectives as well as through Samuel Beckett's (1946) short story, “The Expelled.”     

A Candidate's Perspective: A Review of Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education by Emanuel Berman

The author reviews Emanuel Berman's book Impossible Training from the perspective of a candidate in psychoanalytic training at The William Alanson White Institute in New York. The author relates aspects of her training experience to issues Berman raises in his article, focusing on and expanding a discussion of key problematic aspects of psychoanalytic training.     

Pine ridge places—Feral,liminal, sacred

Animal dreams can bring us into deeper relationship with our own instinctual nature. They seem to communicate something from the ancient vestiges of our functioning on earth—all the head knowledge in the world cannot match the sheer vibrancy and power of our own animal. In an age characterized by alienation from the rhythms of natural life, animal dreams can remind us that we still retain access to the deepest layers of instinctual wisdom. This is particularly relevant for women, as they tend to suffer the consequences of an overly technological society most keenly. Women's lives are anchored in natural rhythms, and the impact of living in a culture that ignores and denigrates nature is therefore especially wounding. This essay explores the ways in which dreams of animals can help guide women back toward a relationship with their embodied nature. The author researches and explores several examples of animals in women's dreams and the ways in which these dreams can support a return to what is most vital and “natural” in their lives.     

Applications,Implications, Complications: Reply to Reviews by Elkind,Gerson, and Levine

The author appreciates the careful reading and thoughtful reviews by Sue Elkind, Sam Gerson, and Howard Levine. Elkind's review particularly captures and articulates many of the key ideas in the book Building Bridges: The Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis and creatively applies concepts of negotiation, paradox, an inherently multiple “distributed self,” and metaphor in her own work consulting on treatment impasses. Gerson incisively focuses on the core idea of recognizing, accepting, and bridging differences and contradictions in personal, and national, perspectives; he also articulates an understanding of the attempt of relational analytic writers to bridge the intrapsychic and the interpersonal with due recognition of each. The author replies extensively to Levine's comparison of Pizer's work with that of Semrad and other “classical” analysts and challenges Levine's premise that a relational perspective, grounded as it is in a two-person contextual psychology, ignores or devalues interpretation, insight, free association, and autonomous mental functioning. Quoting from clinical material in his book, Pizer presents the outcome of a “relational” analysis in terms of the patient's increased access to internal “potential space,” unconscious experience, curiosity, and reflectiveness about the mental life of self and other, and an increased ability to value personal experience in relationship and in solitude.