Tag: psychology

The psychological mechanism that is the precursor of disillusionment is one of the most interesting mental faculties ever known. It manifests itself as a need, a natural unconscious tendency to project idealizations onto real entities and situations. In the minds that experience it, all conscious mental activity seems prone to detach itself from the concrete and spontaneously blend with subjective and fanciful tones, creating a parallel reality in which experience is intensified and presented in ideal aspect. Freud, of course, classified what little he understood of this mechanism as mental illness. But if, on the one hand, it contributes to accentuate, if not to produce future unpleasant contrasts between expectation and reality, it should be noted that creativity is entirely dependent on this capacity to attribute fantastic qualities to concrete experience. From the poet who idealizes the beloved woman to the engineer who creates in his mind the impossible, all of them have their inventiveness, and therefore their distinctiveness, originating in this very same mental faculty.

As with everything else, the Jungian approach to dream interpretation is much more interesting than what is generally done in psychoanalysis. Starting from the same necessary principle that one must find meaning in them, but not restricting himself to an exclusively causal interpretation, Jung opens himself to an infinite horizon of possibilities. An attentive analyst is quickly impressed by the disparity between the dreams of the same individual, from the lucidity of manifestation to the almost always discrepant content, sometimes based in the present, sometimes in the past, sometimes in fantasies, and so on. There are dreams in which the linearity makes understanding easier, while in others there is a strange superposition of disconnected scenes, if not abstract images and a complete absence of a logical link. It is not rare to have the sensorial certainty that such and such event occurred in a dream, without having retained pictorial elements; as well as the memory of loose dialogues and speeches, in manifestations that defy reasoning. Not to mention dreams that are amazingly connected to events that take place in the future. Jung, noting all this complexity, is right in approaching each dream individually and repudiating the attempt to box them all into a “manual of interpretations”. It is true that the psychologist, acting in this way, most often finds himself in the dark; but such humility, not to say courage, can occasionally pay off.

The difference between the works of Jung and Frankl and almost all of what has been written in psychology is that both have designed a psychology for healthy minds, while the bulk of the rest applies only to sick mental states, emphasizing, always and only, the morbidity from which man can suffer. A person who is even remotely experienced and sane and chooses a work by Freud or Adler to enter the science of the mind will come out amazed and disgusted, overcome by a mixture of strangeness and repulsion because, obviously, the man painted in such works has little or nothing in common with himself. And then he will see, on every page, endless classifications of disorders, complexes, and the like, often associated with natural behaviors, but justified by reasons that seem like direct insults to him who reads. In Jung, in Frankl, how different everything is! In these great psychiatrists, who were also great men, although one can find Freud and Adler, the high spirit can finally recognize itself.