Dreaming for the World: A Jungian Study of Dreams During the COVID-19 Pandemic1

This project explores what dreams might reveal about the collective psyche’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in its first year, before the development of vaccines. A brief survey, distributed to Jungian colleagues and organizations, and to various social media sites, invited people to submit online a dream related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four hundred and thirty-six dreams were submitted. Forty additional Russian dreams were collected and submitted by Russian colleagues. Using qualitative research methods based on phenomenological hermeneutics, the researchers categorized and counted the range of COVID imagery. In addition, the researchers describe a range of psychic responses to the pandemic, including horror, grief, sickness, social discord, and violence, but also images of healing and transformation, increased sense of community, and spiritual renewal. Several healing nightmares are presented. Healing alchemical and anima/animus imagery is described. Twelve dreams are introduced and presented. It is concluded that the collective psyche, rooted in the Self, is a healing resource for social and cultural trauma. This project supports Beradt’s (1968) inspirational study of dreaming in Nazi Germany, as well as recent studies of COVID-related dreams and recent publications on the social nature of dreaming.     

I did not expect to be dreaming: Explaining realization in lucid dreams with a Bayesian framework

The commonsense view is that a lucid dream starts when the dreamer realizes that they are currently dreaming. The notion of realization, however, has been accepted at face value, with little consideration of whether the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming in the sense of actual reasoning, or if it is a mere epiphenomenon of lucid dream initiation. This article offers a solution to this problem by, first, arguing that the transition to lucidity can occur as a result of successful reasoning, and second, building a model of this reasoning in terms of probabilistic reasoning. The established Bayesian model explains realization in lucid dreams taking under consideration two factors: the beliefs that the dreamer holds on what is generally probable and improbable, and the dreamer’s admissibility of being in a dream. Defended against important objections, the model offers an explanation of lucid dream initiation, relevant for future research on dreaming.     

Bion’s discovery of alpha function: Thinking under fire on the battlefield and in the consulting room

This paper has traced Bion’s discovery of alpha function and its subsequent elaboration. His traumatic experiences as a young tank commander in World War I (overlaid on, and intertwined with, childhood conflicts) gave him firsthand exposure to very painful emotions that tested his capacity to manage. Later, in the 1950s, after his analysis with Melanie Klein and marriage to Francesca Bion, he undertook the analysis of psychotic patients and learned how they disassembled their ability to know reality as a defense against unbearable emotional truths in their lives. This led Bion to identify an aspect of dreaming that was necessary in order for reality experience to be given personal meaning so that one may learn from experience. Simultaneous with working out this new theory of dreaming, Bion also revisited his World War I experiences that had remained undigested and all these elements coalesced into a selected fact – his discovery of alpha function. In subsequent writings, Bion explored the constituent factors of alpha function, including the container/contained relationship, the PS?D balance, reverie, tolerated doubt and other factors which I have termed the ‘Constellation for Thinking’.     

Enactive or inactive? Cranially envatted dream experience and the extended conscious mind

When we dream, it is often assumed, we are isolated from the external environment. It is also commonly believed that dreams can be, at times, accurate, convincing replicas of waking experience. Here I analyse some of the implications of this view for an enactive theory of conscious experience. If dreams are, as described by the received view, “inactive”, or “cranially envatted” whilst replicating the experience of being awake, this would be problematic for certain extended conscious mind theories. Focusing specifically on Alva Noë’s enactive view, according to which the vehicles of perceptual experience extend beyond the brain, I argue that dreams are a quandary. Noë’s view is that dreaming is consistent with enactivism because even if dreams are inactive and shut off from the external environment, they are not “full-blown” perceptual consciousness, and also, there is some reason to reject the inactive claim. However, this view rests on an unjustified and reductive account of dreams which is not supported by empirical evidence. Dreams can indeed replicate waking phenomenal experience during inactive periods of sleep, and we have no reason to suspect that dreams which are more inactive are less “full-blown”. Taken together, this shows that dreams are indeed relevant to extended conscious mind theories and need to be taken into account by enactivists.     

TRANSFERENCE BEFORE TRANSFERENCE

This paper is predominantly a clinical presentation that describes the transmigration of one patient's transference to another, with the analyst functioning as a sort of transponder. It involves an apparently accidental episode in which there was an unconscious intersection between two patients. The author's aim is to show how transference from one case may affect transference in another, a phenomenon the author calls transference before transference. The author believes that this idea may serve as a tool for understanding the unconscious work that takes place in the clinical situation. In a clinical example, the analyst finds himself caught up in an enactment involving two patients in which he becomes the medium of what happens in session.     

On psychoanalytic writing

Analytic writing constitutes a literary genre of its own. It involves the linking of an analytic idea (developed in a scholarly manner) with an analytic experience created in the medium of language. What makes this literary genre so demanding is that experience-including analytic experience-does not come to us in words. This fact generates a paradox that lies at the core of analytic writing: analytic experience (which cannot be said or written) must be transformed into 'fi ction' (an imaginative rendering of experience in words) in order to convey to the reader something of what is true to the emotional experience that the analyst had with the patient. The author discusses a clinical passage from one of his recently published papers in an effort to demonstrate some of the conscious and unconscious thinking that goes into his writing. He then looks closely at the way the language works in a successful piece of theoretical analytic writing. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of facets of the author's experience with analytic writing including the psychological 'state of writing', which is at once a meditation and a wrestling match with language; experimenting with the form (structure) of an analytic essay; and the question of originality in analytic writing.