Richard M. Jones (2) (1925–)

POINTS OF INTEREST

FREUD
The distinction between manifest dreams and latent dream thoughts equipped Freud to apply leverage to the study of dreams at a time when science was prepared to dismiss dreaming as the meaningless reflection of lawlessly discharging cortical neurons. From the latent dream thoughts Freud was able to draw convincing support for his wish-fulfillment hypothesis, which demonstrated that dreams were at least not exceptions to the lawfulness of nature. It is sometimes overlooked that this was the fundamental axiom that Freud was behooved by his position in history to establish: that dreaming is not meaningless. The ways in which it is meaningful are still largely unknown. “The Interpretation of Dreams,” by Freud, in sum, asks: (1) the distinction between the motives of a dream and the meanings of a dream; (2) the distinction between a dream’s fulfillment of unconscious wishes and its fulfillment of preconscious and conscious wishes; and (3) the distinction between the biological and psychological functions of dreaming. Freud: “At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming – the explanation of its peculiar nature. I say this in order to make it possible to assess the value of the notorious “prospective purpose” of dreams. The fact that dreams concern themselves with attempts at solving the problems by which our mental life is faced is no more strange than that our conscious waking life should do so; beyond this it merely tells us that that activity can also be carried on in the preconscious…”

JUNG
the psychological function of dreaming, for Jung, is that of compensation – for a kind of conscious myopia by a kind of unconscious vision. Each life, says Jung, is guided by a “private myth,” grounded in both individual instinctual patterns and the history of mankind, and mediated by the “archetypes” which are deployed in both. The conscious mind, in its one sided attention to superficial externalities, tends naturally in waking life to become insulated by alien preoccupations from the profundities of the unconscious mind, which remains through life in proximity with the wellsprings of universal truths. The unconscious tends to exert a corrective or compensative influence on the straying conscious whenever it is brought into focused commerce with it. The function of dreaming is to bring about such commerce nightly.

RICHARD M. JONES
So far, when speaking of manifest dreams, we have meant manifest dream content. That we could speak thus loosely without appearing inexact in our thinking can be put down to the fact that the distinction between content and structure has not had the attention in dream analysis that it has in related areas. What do we mean by structure in reference to dreams? Our attention to the structure of manifest dreams is fixed at that particular nexus of psychoanalytic theory where the genetic and adaptive points of view converge on the structural point of view. We begin by agreeing with Jung, Silberer, French, and Hall that the psychological function of dreaming is the solving of problems best solved by primary process cognition.… (mais)