From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #171 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Saturday, August 5 2000 Volume 02 : Number 171 Today's Subjects: ----------------- b/jungdream1 ["Donald G. Keller" ] b/jungdream2 ["Donald G. Keller" ] B/Freud, Jung, and Dreamland [Todd Huff ] Re: B/Freud, Jung, and Dreamland [Todd Huff ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:27:39 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/jungdream1 [The following is the first draft of a future essay (title to come). I wrote most of it in the middle of the night at work (fair warning!) a few weeks ago, and only now am giving myself permission to type it out and elaborate on it a bit. But this first part is a couple months old:] At the beginning of May I bought a cheap copy of Jung's autobiography =Memories, Dreams, Reflections= (which is justly well- known), and read most of it; and in the chapter called "Confrontation with the Unconscious" (p. 180) he relates a dream he had just after his break with Freud and just before World War I, at a time when he was suffering a psychic crisis somewhere between a breakdown and a breakthrough (unlike Nietzsche, who went insane, Jung recovered and lived productively to a ripe old age). Here's the actual text of the dream; I considered italicizing key words and phrases, but decided it might be more fun for the assembled multitude to allow their own associations to occur. So fire up those active imaginations: "I was with an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage, in a lonely, rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn; the eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried's horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him. We were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over the rocks. "Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain, in the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead. "Filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great and beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the murder might be discovered. But a tremendous downfall of rain began, and I knew that it would wipe out all traces of the dead. I had escaped the danger of discovery; life could go on, but an unbearable feeling of guilt remained." On awakening, Jung reports, he felt that he =must= figure out the dream's meaning, or shoot himself. And then he contemplated how he recognized Siegfried as being a part of himself ("as though I myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried"), a part that needed killing, his heroic ego; and that he needed to bow to a higher will. And then he says, "The small, brown-skinned savage who accompanied me...was an embodiment of the primitive shadow. The rain showed that the tension between consciousness and the unconscious was being resolved." [p.180] I had been paying only normal interest in the dream to that point; but when I read that last sentence a flood of images...well, rained down on my consciousness, and I began to see how the symbolic structure of this dream was reflected all over "the matter of Faith." The =first= thing I thought was about the rain-drenched fight in the alley between Angel and Faith in "Five by Five," where Faith finally breaks down crying in Angel's arms asking him to kill her. Angel, it seems clear, is functioning as Faith's shadow (as he does for her double Buffy). Add to this the shiver I got when Angel talks about how "the darkness" (the shadow/id/evil/unconscious) "swallowed [her] up," and it's clear that symbolically Angel = "darkness," and she pines for him to extinguish her. And what actually has happened to her is that her "heroic ego"--her swaggering Slayer =persona=--has been "killed." And note that when Buffy arrives, they fall into the roles they played in =Faith's= dreams, Nightmare Buffy and Timid Faith, i.e. now it's Buffy who is Faith's shadow, and again Faith suggests being killed! That's the end of what I wrote in May; there is probably more to be said on this subject, but I'm going to leave it there for the moment; because just a couple weeks ago when I got Anthony Stevens' =Private Myths=, I discovered that he quotes and analyzes the dream as well, and I had an entirely different reaction to it this time. (It should be noted that this is a very famous dream of Jung's: most books about him mention it, and several quote it in full as Stevens and I do.) So Anthony Stevens, on page 115 of =Private Myths=, quotes Jung's dream in full as I have just done, and then spends about nine pages analyzing it, making salient points about the personal context (the break with Freud, principally), the cultural context (Wagner among other things), and the archetypal context (the "primitive" shadow, the healing rain, etc.). Stevens does with several other dreams in the course of his excellent book. And what did =you= think? ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:30:29 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/jungdream2 =My= thought, this second encounter, thinking about it in the middle of the night, was to flash on Faith and her "savage" vampire companion hiding in the movie marquee and shooting Angel down in the street with a poisoned arrow in "Graduation Day" I. The fugue of pattern-recognition (again) that =that= set off is quite daunting, and I'll =try= to keep it as simple and linear as I can. Jung and Stevens both recognize that Jung's dream is an =internal= psychodrama (however it may relate to other people, i.e. Freud); similarly, =Buffy=, a Jungian fantasy, can frequently be construed as the dramatization/externalization of an inner conflict in Buffy's psyche. Let me back up, not just a step, but all the way to "Welcome to the Hellmouth," where Cordelia and Buffy, who have just met, encounter Willow at the water fountain, Cordelia insults her, and Buffy reacts (against Cordelia and for Willow). To me this encounter is transparently about Buffy's conflict between her old Cordelia-nature and her desire for a new Willow-nature; and I've said before that it's a crucial early moment when she chooses to make friends with Willow, not Cordelia. I think this triadic pattern, this "let's you and her fight" of two psychic elements (or doubles) acting out a conflict while a third stands by, is a very persistent one in the series; without elaborating here (I really do want to get back to that "GDI" scene), I'll point to the two "Slayer in chains" scenes in "Consequences" and "Enemies" as two more examples. The twist in the latter, of course, being that the "lines of force" reverse near the end (so Faith+Angel-->Buffy becomes Buffy+Angel-->Faith). (This really does take a long time to explain...=contra= Lacan, these patterns and congruencies occur to me with such alacrity, and seem so laborious to translate into/comment on in verbal language.) =An=yway...the "Graduation Day" scene is another such triad, the striking thing being that Angel, arguing with Buffy in the street, describes her actions as an "attack"...and not immediately, but partway through Buffy's whiny rejoinder, he is "attacked" by Faith's arrow. Bullseye! (Sorry.) Symbolically speaking, Faith and Buffy are "the same" person, and the attacks (on that level) are one attack; note that Faith doesn't intend to kill Angel outright; her main motivation is to hurt Buffy (as evil Angel's motivation was in "Becoming"). And I began to realize that, although Buffy and Faith are on the surface level two different characters with different motivations in the drama, on the aforementioned deeper leve, they are "the same" person going through "the same" pattern: Buffy: 1. attacks Angel (verbally) 2. gets encouragement from her mentor (Giles)(against Wesley) 3. fights faith 4. puts herself suicidally at risk (offering herself to heal Angel) 5. ends up in the hospital (unconscious) 6. dreams about Faith 7. wakes up Faith: 1. attacks Angel (with an arrow) 2. gets encouragement from her mentor (the Mayor) 3. fights Buffy 4. puts herself suicidally at risk (diving off the roof) 5. ends up in the hospital (in a coma) 6. dreams about Buffy 7. wakes up But that's not all! Buffy in "Graduation Day" II goes through that same process =again=, at least steps 1 and 4: suicidally attacking (verbally, but with knife in hand) the Mayor (Angel's double, as the hospital scene demonstrates), managing to lure him to his destruction while surviving herself. And after the events of "This Year's Girl/"Who Are You" (which have their own complex set of mirrorings/parallels, both with each other and with the =Angel= dyad which I won't go into just now), she arrives in L.A., where she shoots Angel again, not once but twice (crossbow, gun) =and= hurts someone he cares about, not once but twice (Cordelia, Wesley), doubling and redoubling the "GDI" scene and at the same time putting Angel in Buffy's place. Then she puts herself in a suicidal position (begging Angel to kill her) and instead of unconsciousness she suffers a breakdown. But unlike the previous scene, it rains (healing, transformation...which echoes, instead, her climactic third dream as well as "Surprise"/"Innocence"; note the way the end of "Five by Five" and the beginning of "Sanctuary" palindromically echo the beginning of "Innocence" and the end of "Surprise": anguished hollering in the rainy alley/Slayer and Angel in his bedroom). Is this making any sense whatever?? (Maybe this would work better with diagrams.) On a subsequent overnight, I was reading through the Stevens book again (researching for my dream-essay), and read over Jung's dream again, and this time I had a =frisson= in an entirely different direction. Consider the following phrases from the dream: "brown-skinned...savage" "lonely, rocky...landscape" "made of bones of the dead" "furious speed down the precipitous slope" I don't know about you, but that instantly suggests to me the climactic scene of Buffy's Dream in "Restless." (I suspect it hadn't been broadcast the first time I contemplated the dream.) But the interesting thing about matching the two patterns is that "Restless retells Jung's dream from the "Siegfried" point of view! The three figures are the same: the primordial shadow (1st Slayer), the articulating figure (Tara), and the hero (Buffy). One way of looking at =both= manifestations of the pattern is that it describes the superego and the id (persona and shadow, in Jung's terms) ganging up on the (inflated) ego. Think of it this way: Tara doubles Willow, who doubles Buffy in the sense of being her "light" shadow (the condition to which she should aspire; Giles fits here as well), while the 1st Slayer doubles Faith, Buffy's "dark" shadow, in this sense the aspect of Faith always berating Buffy for being uppity. So you have a version of the folk-motif (still extant in commercials) of the little angel/little devil on one's shoulders, or the "good cop/bad cop" dynamic going on. The message (as Jung took from the original dream): "You need to submit to your =dharma=, your sacred duty to society (persona/superego), and ally yourself with, and draw upon, the source of your power (shadow/id)." To which Buffy answers a big fat NO: "You're not the source of me" ("Restless"), "I don't take orders, I do things my way" ("What's My Line"). And she repels the attack that killed Siegfried in Jung's dream. So this merely confirms my interpretation of that part of "Restless," that it represents Buffy wanting to have a normal life and put aside her Slayerness; and Tara's repeated line about "you think you know...you haven't even begun" is a rebuke that foreshadows Buffy suffering a comeuppance. (I guess that's a prediction.) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:24:54 -0700 (PDT) From: Todd Huff Subject: B/Freud, Jung, and Dreamland > > At the beginning of May I bought a cheap copy of > Jung's > autobiography =Memories, Dreams, Reflections= (which > is justly well- > known), and read most of it; and in the chapter > called > "Confrontation with the Unconscious" (p. 180) he > relates a dream he > had just after his break with Freud and just before > World War I, at > a time when he was suffering a psychic crisis > somewhere between a > breakdown and a breakthrough (unlike Nietzsche, who > went insane, > Jung recovered and lived productively to a ripe old > age). > Just a little off the track here, but it might be interesting to you or others. There's a novel called "Dreamland" by Kevin Baker that's just come out in paperback. The story takes place in and around the various amusement parks (one named, appropriately enough, "Dreamland") on Coney Island in the early part of the 20th Century. It follows a number of characters (the villianous gangster, the gangster who falls in love and tries to go straight, the political boss, the good girl gone bad, the virtuous factory girl, etc), many based on real historical characters. It also includes Freud and Jung's trip to NYC at about this time (the author admits that he fudges a little). It's a good read and a bit of an eye-opener for those who aren't familiar with life in that time and place. In any case, F and J aren't in the book as much as many of the others, but these scenes are told from Freud's point of view and are quite interesting. It involves both dreams that he's been having and his anxiety that Jung will leave him. From the afterward: "In regard to Freud and Jung, I have relied heavily on the many writings and biographies of the two great psychoanalysts, and also up Dr. Saul Rosenzweig's eye-opening "Freud, Jung and Hall the King-Maker", and on Frederic Morton's panorama of pre-World War I Vienna, "Thunder at Twilight". __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 21:06:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Todd Huff Subject: Re: B/Freud, Jung, and Dreamland - --- Todd Huff wrote: > > > > > At the beginning of May I bought a cheap copy of > > Jung's > > autobiography =Memories, Dreams, Reflections= > (which > > is justly well- > > known), and read most of it; and in the chapter > > called > > "Confrontation with the Unconscious" (p. 180) he > > relates a dream he > > had just after his break with Freud and just > before > > World War I, at > > a time when he was suffering a psychic crisis > > somewhere between a > > breakdown and a breakthrough (un Looks like all of my post got cut off somehow. Apologies if you've seen this already. There's a novel by Kevin Baker that's just come out in paperback. It's called DREAMLAND and takes place in and around the three amusement parks on Coney Island about 1910. One is called, appropriately enough, Dreamland. The book follows a number of historical and fictitious characters and includes Freud and Jung's trip to America (the author admits that he fudges the dates a bit). Freud gets fewer pages than most of the characters, but it does include a few of his dreams and his anxiety over Jung's apparent desire to leave him. It's an eye-opening look at a period in our history that I knew little about and I heartily recommend it. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #171 *****************************