TRANSFERENCE: From a Freudian perspective (I’ll mention Jung in a moment) dreams can be understood as fantasies depicting our wishes to master the problems of life, particularly when they resemble old traumatic events, now mostly repressed or forgotten. A dream might then typically blend the old and the new in an attempt to master a deep-rooted problem, as in a fairy-tale where an unhappy situation is solved and the characters get married and live happily ever after. Those fantasies often repeat themselves in a counselling situation when people whose lives feel unfulfilled attempt to live out their fairy-tale by falling in love with the person who listens to their unhappy account. This phenomenon, called ‘transference,’ once scared the hell out of Dr Joseph Breuer when the ur-analytic patient (Anna O, aka Bertha Pappenheim) fell in love with him in precisely that manner. Enter Freud, who understood this one-sided love-affair for what it really was, i.e. Bertha’s unconscious attempt to give her miserably neurotic life a happy ending. This is a scenario, moreover, which I have repeatedly seen and I know very well it has nothing to do with me as a person. In consequence thereof I cannot continue to listen to such a person unless she desists and quickly understands the real origin of her inappropriate feelings. Generally, however, such people find it hard to understand that their failed relationships recapitulate an old script and they seem to have an uncanny knack for finding bad partners. Writers know this, as we see in the following excerpt*: ‘She must’ve been all mixed up about him, forever trying to win him over.’ ‘Do you think so?’ ‘Oh sure. She almost did it by instinct. Couldn’t keep herself from repeating an earlier relationship. Do you remember if as a girl she tried to curry favour with Japhta?’ ‘Yes,’ Nita sighed, ‘she did that, even though – how can I put it – he treated her like a dog. Is that why she fell for all the dangerous types?Uh-huh, I’m sure it was.’ Dreams are good at exhuming compulsive old traumas, seeing that they have access to the unconscious, but the fact is that I prefer not to delve into dreams with such a traumatic substratum. I’m not into therapy. I might explain the dynamic and then advise those clients to consult a therapist instead. I certainly decline to respond to the development of transference, as routinely occurs during classical psychoanalysis, where such a transference is deliberately used as an interpretive aid. Instead, I adopt a more Jungian way of understanding a dream, without – and I really must stress this – the accretion of new-age superstition which some Jungians seem to profess. I am neither a soothsayer nor fortune-teller. What I do is to make people see what their dreams tell them, based upon experience and psychoanalytic insight. Intuition plays a certain role, inasmuch as experience sharpens one’s insight, but dream interpretation is not a dark art. Jung could talk like a guru, of course, but this is not directly related his insight into the function of dreaming. He looked at dreams as a kind of compensatory mechanism, making up for what was missing in a person’s life. That’s just another way of describing a wish and Jung could be disingenuous as well by saying, for instance, that he looked at every dream as if he knew nothing about it. He knew very well – at least as well as Freud did – but the effect was that people thought he was psychic. He was highly perceptive and intuitive, however, and more future-orientated than Freud. His clients typically tended to suffer from a kind of ennui, a feeling of aimlessness about their direction and purpose in life. Most of us need a sense of having a meaningful purpose and whereas Freud explored our troubles about love – knowing that people unlucky in love routinely fall ill – I’m reluctant to go there. I prefer to look at a dream as a roadmap. There’s no doubt that dreams are able to show us a meaningful pathway ahead. Jung called it the wisdom of the two million year old man in our head, and the saying that we should follow our dreams has a certain kind of logic. (* From the Epilogue, ‘The 18th Variation’)
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 18:16:05 +0000
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