When World Events Invade Our Dreams
Plate 101 from Gods’ Man (1929) by Lynd Ward; Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith / Public Domain
Part Two of a Conversation with psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Thomas Singer
You can read Part One of this two-part conversation here.
Sigmund Freud famously wrote, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”[1] Building on this understanding of dreams as presenting the unconscious images, patterns, and themes of our inner world, Carl Jung wrote, “The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul.” [2]
Continuing my conversation with Thomas Singer, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst who has spent years investigating cultural changes from a psychological perspective, we will now focus on how cultural complexes may sometimes appear in dreams.
Dale Kushner: Could we begin by giving our readers an example of what we mean by a personal complex and a cultural complex?[3]
Thomas Singer: A personal complex arises from circumstances that are unique to an individual. An example would be a negative father complex based on a difficult relationship between a father and son that affects all subsequent relationships of the son with authority figures—whether a coach, a teacher, or a boss.
A cultural complex arises from circumstances that are unique to a specific culture and affect a large group of people. An example would be the racial complex in the United States,, which is based on a four-hundred-year history that has affected both Black and white people for many generations.
DK: Twenty years ago, when you met a friend or neighbor on the street and asked how that person was, the answer was usually “fine” or “good.” Civic politeness rewarded such niceties. Today, ask someone how they feel, and the answer might be “I feel angry” or afraid or exhausted and sad. Do you think the change in the mood of this country is related to a cultural complex? Can you give a name to this complex?
TS: The mood in the country is rotten. We are in the midst of what we might think of as a dystopian complex in which our customary optimism about the inevitability of progress (a cultural complex itself) is far less certain than it has been for a long time—certainly since the end of World War Two. The dystopian mood affects our attitude about the past, present, and future. There is a growing sense of “dis-ease,” meaning uneasiness bordering on disease, in the nation. I sometimes think this is the effect of an unconscious extinction anxiety—that, at a deep level—people are deeply fearful that the viability of life on the planet as we know it will cease to exist.
DK: It seems our emotional lives are strongly affected by what you are calling a cultural complex. Do cultural complexes show up in dreams? If so, are our individual psyches attempting to process what’s happening in our world? Is it helpful to know whether a dream is communicating a cultural rather than a personal complex? How do we tell which it is?
TS: Yes, I do think cultural complexes appear in dreams as we attempt to process what is happening around us and inside us. Sometimes it is very difficult to sort out what is a personal and cultural complex as they quite easily get mixed up with one another. Generally, the contents of a cultural complex reflect broader social issues rather than the more individual issues of a personal complex.
DK: In 2016, when this country implemented an immigration policy that separated parents and children, I had a dream that I was a child that had been put in a cage and was crying for my mother. Would this be an example of how a cultural complex appears in a dream?
TS: Your dream of being placed in a cage and crying for your mother would be a perfect example of a cultural complex in which your natural empathy for the suffering of a child expresses itself in your identifying with an immigrant child who has been separated from parents and locked up. The fact that the dream occurred in 2016 at the time when such forced separations were occurring would be a strong indicator that you were resonating with a broader social or cultural issue rather than a personal one. Our treatment of immigrants has been a longstanding cultural complex in the United States with waxing and waning periods of intensity over time. The pendulum has certainly swung to the side of deep fear and antipathy towards immigrants which was clear in the recent Presidential campaign in which arousing the fear of criminal and murderous immigrants touched deep emotional chords of the ongoing immigrant cultural complex in many Americans.
DK: Do dreams only identify problem areas or do they sometimes show us solutions or ways to resolve a personal or cultural complex?
TS: Dreams often highlight our difficulties and bring them to our conscious attention. There are occasions when dreams also point to a way of resolving a complex. The dream of a white man growing up in a deeply racist community comes to mind. He had a dream about a five-year-old Black child sitting on the beach. It pointed the way to a resolution of his long-standing feelings of being unlovable. His white mother had been deeply rejecting of him, but a Black woman who worked in his home loved him as a young child. His racist cultural complex literally erased from his conscious memory that he had been loved as child by a Black mother substitute. When he realized that he was the Black child on the beach in the dream—a Black part of him that he had previously disowned—he was able to remember the love he experienced as a child, and it began to flow back through him. He recovered his sense of lovability that had been sacrificed to the racist cultural complex. The recovery of that sense of lovability came through
[1] Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), p. 723
[2] Jung, Carl, “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1933), Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, Volume 10, p 144
[3] Singer, Thomas, with Catherine Kaplinsky, “The Cultural Complex,” in Jungian Psychoanalysis: Working in the Spirit of C. G. Jung, edited by Murray Stein. Open Court Publishing (2010) pp 22-37.
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