PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL THERAPY: DREAMS & THE IMAGINATION
with dreams and the creativeness? Consider the type of the imagination and dreams, and illustrate with good examples from clinical literature.
'The wish is a little invisible door in the innermost & most key recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic evening which was psyche a long time before there was any ego-consciousness, and that may stay psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness may increase. . . in dreams we placed on the likeness of that more widespread, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. . . . '
(Carl Jung, 1964)
These words symbolize Carl Jung's famous explanation of the type and need for the desire. Other definitions possible: for illustration, if one is a materialist, then he understands dreams to be little more than the secretions of chemicals from glands in the brain and so simply a assortment of worthless ram fragments. But leaving these prejudices apart, this essay can be involved with the psycho-spiritual interpretation of dreams, and here Jung's explanation supplies us with an outstanding starting-point for understanding.
For Jung and other psychotherapists, the fantasy is a gate and a passing, a 'invisible door', into the personal and collective unconscious, which is the basic substrata of our psychic life. Freud spoke in the same way of the goal as 'the royal highway to the unconscious' (Freud, 1999). The collective unconscious is inhabited by the archetypes - for example, archetypes of the mother, wise old man, child, and trickster - which are'. . . irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent varieties that seem to participate the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest themselves spontaneously everywhere, anytime' (Jung, 1974). Quite simply, the archetypes are pre-existent typical situations, stored in the collective unconscious, that have occurred countless times in man's background and which may actually modern man in symbolic form in his dreams. These symbols are packed with knowledge and restorative vitality for patients and therapists equally. Dreams are information and compensating realtors that give the dreamer advice about how to balance or re-adjust his thoughts, feelings, and attitudes to life. Moreover, they include a numinous aspect that can enhance the religious life of the dreamer. By consulting and heeding the advice of your dreams and our imaginations therapists and patients can learn serious and vital knowledge about themselves and about the causes and possible methods of treatment for subconscious stress (Hillman, 1980).
Scientists and psychologists identify four basic says of consciousness: the state of waking awareness, the status of dream awareness, the point out of deep sleeping consciousness and the express of awakened consciousness (See: Allen, 1995). Two further fantasy expresses are also diagnosed. Lucid Dreaming is where in fact the dreamer appreciates that he is dreaming and positively handles the images in the goal. Lucid thinking can be of two types: 'low' status or 'high' talk about. 'Low' status lucid fantasizing allows the dreamer to manipulate the images in the dream for his own enjoyment, pleasure, entertainment and so on. 'High' point out lucid dreaming also allows the dreamer to understand the images and symbols of the wish, but this independence can be used by the dreamer to question spiritual help, advice or guidance. Non-Lucid Thinking is the state of hawaii where the dreamer is unaware that he is dreaming. Non-lucid thinking can also be split into 'low' and 'high' says. 'Low' express non-lucid dreams happen from the non-public unconscious and are also in person conditioned, being composed of fragments of recollections from that day or proceeding times or of panic, panic, excitement or other emotional states. 'High' point out non-lucid dreams come up from the collective unconscious and are intensely laden and impregnated with images and symbols of spiritual, mythological or archetypal figure. The images and icons in these dreams are impersonal: that is, they can be attracted from the collective finance of images that are stored in the collective unconscious; they appear to the dreamer however in a particular symbolic form that is important for their psychic situation (Leuner, 1969).
Let us look then at a professional medical example of desire therapy taken from Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Inside the section 'Psychiatric Activities' (Jung, 1973) Jung says of an eighteen year old catatonic patient who had been sexually abused by her family as an adolescent and who was now mute and schizophrenic. This girl had particularly peculiar dreams. She details how she lived on the moon and was an associate of a community who have been obligated to live underground because these were terrorised by a beautiful vampire who wiped out their women and children. The lady decides 1 day to save lots of the moon people by eliminating the vampire; she takes a sacrificial knife and awaits the vampire on the tower. However when the vampire swoops upon her he's so exquisitely beautiful that she actually is enchanted by him and can't eliminate him. Jung says how after these dream confessions the individual commenced to speak again. The lady discussed that by this confession of her magic formula 'moon' life Jung as her doctor possessed prevented her from departing the unappealing and painful Globe that she detested and escaping to the moon that was for her packed with meaning. Though the patient delivered into her catatonic talk about for several calendar months after this research, eventually Jung was able, by explaining the icons in these dreams, to lead the lady back again to sanity.
Jung talks about the dreams such as this. The patient having suffered a whole lot abuse in real life compensates on her behalf tragedy by escaping to the moon where everything is beautiful; she actually is in Jung's expression 'humiliated in the eyes of the world, but elevated in the world of fantasy' (Jung, 1973). The individual transforms the incest she endured in true to life, into a mythical and religious experience in the realm of fantasy; she actually is assailed by a beautiful and mythical creature (the vampire) who's the complete contrary of the daddy who abused her in true to life. By detailing these images to the individual, and by revealing her these images designed that she had to return to Globe to confront her troubles there, the girl was after some time fully recovered and in a position to lead an totally normal life.
This is one example of the way the interpretation and justification of symbols and images in a desire can bring about profound psychological recovery for patients. The curious student will find a great many other such cases in Recollections, Dreams, Reflections as well as in James Hillman (1980) and Martha Crampton (1979).
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Our creativity is the centre of most individual creative activity and is intimately connected to your dreams and to the world of the unconscious. Thoughts defined firmly in a philosophical or dictionary sense means 'the mental faculty of forming images of external objects not present to the senses' (OED). That's, we use our imaginations to create pictures or images of incidents or moments that are idealistic or fantastic. Which is dreams and their symbols and motifs - such as the mandala (circle), Nazi swastika, phallus, quaternity (square) - that supply the essential materials for our imaginations. This is why throughout background great painters -- from Beethoven and Wagner, to Shakespeare and Coleridge -- have produced some their finest work when their imaginations have been encouraged by images they have observed in their dreams.
Technically the thoughts is one of five basic degrees of mental faculty; the others include: the abstract head, intuition, the concrete head and thinking. So too, creativity is the deepest laying degree of mental faculty: it sub-ducts beneath consciousness to enter the deepest levels of the unconscious: the collective unconscious, and its own inhabitants, the archetypes. The thoughts is thus effectively a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious. When we use our creativeness we dwell upon images that people have seen inside our unconscious by means of dreams and we re-arrange this material in forms that are fantastic or creative. We envision how we want the earth to be. Put on clinical therapy, the utilization of imaginative techniques can engender profound improvements in the express of heads of patients. Carl Jung advocated a technique called 'lively thoughts', where whilst in a waking status a patient concentrates intensely after images that made an appearance in recent dreams and so tries to enhance the features of such images and icons and so contemplate their relevance. By this awareness after dream images, the patient can discover and then incorporate the icons that are being produced by his unconscious. This integration -- named 'individuation' (Jung, 1973) - produces for the patient circumstances of psychic and religious equilibrium: that is, the unconscious and conscious halves of his personality are well balanced against one another.
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In the ultimate analysis, it must be said, that from a psycho-therapeutic viewpoint, dreams and thoughts are of the utmost importance for specialized medical mindset. Dreams are a door to a vast and immense tank of age-old images and intelligence which when disclosed to an individual in archetypal and symbolic form can change his psychological behaviour and guide him out of psychic stress. The creativity is vital too as the bridge to the world of the unconscious, developing a connection between this world which.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
-- Crampton, M. (1984). Dialogic Imaginable Integration. Institute of Psychosynthesis.
-- Crampton, M. (1979). 'The Use of Mental Imagery in Psychosynthesis', Psychosynthesis Research Base.
-- Freud, S. (1999 Ed. ). The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford College or university Press, Oxford.
-- Hobson, A. (1995). 'Working With Dreams' from Sleeping, Scientific American Catalogue.
-- Hillman, J. (1980). Dreams and the Underworld. Harper and Row, NY.
-- Jung, C. G. (1973). Remembrances, Dreams, Reflections. Pantheon Books, London.
-- Jung, C. G. (1964). Civilization in Changeover. Bollingen, Princeton.
-- Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Bollingen, Princeton.
-- Jung, C. G. (1960). The Composition and Dynamics of the Psyche. Bollingen, Princeton.
-- Leuner, H. (1969). 'Led Affected Imagery'. North american Journal of Psychotherapy. Vol. 23, No. 1.
-- The Oxford British Dictionary. (1989). Oxford University or college Press, Oxford.
