Sigmund Freud gave the night dream a legitimacy for people by using dream recall and associations to dream symbols as a primary method for Freudian analysis, or self-awareness of inner content through inner discovery and revelation of who one is as a whole person and not just as a personality usually shown to the world.
If it is revealed in your dream, it is you, seems to be a working principle of Freud’s. Often dream analysis led to revealing repressed sexual feelings and patterns in both men and women dreamers showing maybe first in their dreams.
Carl Gustav Jung adapted Freud’s approach of dream analysis by association, but added to this approach an archetypal layer of dream analysis. Jung also saw universal personality dynamics in dreams, such as Jung’s defining the animus, the masculine counterpart in women, and for the men, the anima, or feminine in men. Both sexes also had the shadow and persona show up in dreams and personality behavior. Thus Jung defined Jungian analysis as the individual’s relation to his or her archetypes evolving in and individuation and wholeness process with the birth of the real ego in thus separating out from identification with or dominance by archetypal patterns.
Strephon Kaplan-Williams’ major contribution was to develop a comprehensive dreamwork methodology that when applied to a dream series and personal development led to personal growth and wholeness. Kaplan-Williams has also done much work in separating out ego dynamics from archetypal patterns by working with the dream ego, the image of the dreamer in the dream, to create a more active and integrative dream ego in future dreaming and to create a more effective and real waking ego, already trained in dream states, that can handle life in vastly superior ways to what went before when the dreamer had not yet worked with his and her dreams.
Specifics of the Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Methodology
In the Jungian-Senoi dreamwork approach the ultimate focus is on the dream, always the dream, and not on a personality theory evolved in some psychologies that also work with dreams.
If you have a methodology you do not need a dogma, says Kaplan-Williams.
The other major emphasis with Jungian-Senoi dreamwork methodology is the process work enacted under guidance with the dreamer in which parts of the dreamer’s dream are enacted using methods combined, such as Following The Dream Ego with Dream Enactments. Why others do dream enactments as a kind of dream psychodrama, they do not use as the context for these dream dramas what the dream ego is doing and not doing in the dream, nor on the dream’s functional need to be more whole.
The two major principles discovered in the Jungian-Senoi process are making conscious the dreamer and the dream through objectifying the dream and following the dream ego and creating congruence and resolution to the dream’s dynamics and issues as a natural process evoked by dreamwork methodology such as Dream Reentry and Dream Enactment, very powerful techniques indeed that should only be used by trained professionals. For these processes go beyond the ego capacity of the dreamer to fundamental core patterns in the psyche revealed by the dream and its dreamwork.
Archetypes and Archetypal symbols
Strephon Kaplan-Williams has also developed what Jung discovered as active imagination into a full process orientation of ego relating to archetype through dreamworking the dream.
Archetypal symbols abound in all fully reported dreams, but they also seem to have a literal level in the dream itself where the symbols function together to create a story which is the remembered dream.
Kaplan-Williams has originated his Seven Basic Archetypes model, (sometimes attributed falsely to Jung) to show how archetypes work inherently together in the psyche of the human, in dreams, and in the cosmos itself. Jung postulated tentatively that there were thirteen archetypes but the crystal model of seven satisfied far better the simplicity principles of creating models in the scientific community.
The Jungian-Senoi approach also has methods for an archetype (Symbol Immersion) as well as for a configuration of archetypes in a dream or a personality (Dream Reentry).
Jungian Personality Theory
Jung postulated that every person had a psyche, an inner active content of dynamics based on the archetypes, which were also seen as inner primarily. His basic components of the psyche of the human being are ego, shadow, persona, animus or anima, shadow and persona. In addition is the Self, the central archetype out of which originates the person’s individuation and wholeness processes. In addition, Jung postulated a personal unconscious for repressed and other dynamics primarily from childhood, and a collective unconscious which includes universal dynamics called archetypes.
These archetypes show up in story form in myths and folk tales, and Jungians have done much work in pointing out how archetypes work in these cultural artifacts.
When applying Jungian personality dynamics, such as anima-animus, to dreams, the Jungian model weakens so much that it does not always apply and is not found useful.
One example is… does a woman have an anima as well as an animus or just an animus? And when applied to dreams, is it really true that all masculine figures in dreams represent her animus, her inner masculine?
What then of feminine figures in women’s dreams? These then represent other Jungian archetypes such as the Great Mother or the Erotic Goddess, such as Aphrodite. But then these are mythic symbols. Where are the dynamics of the psyche, such as shadow and persona, or anima and animus? Is the Jungian Shadow a personality dynamic or also an archetype. Things get confusing, especially when trying to stay with symbols in the dream and not project a personality theory, which Jung’s is, onto dream content.
In the Jungian-Senoi approach to dreams and dreamwork, since it is mainly a methodology there is no need to get hung up on terms for a personality theory.
Most psychologies have a personality theory and a methodology.
Strephon Kaplan-Williams solved the problem by not having a personality theory to codify dreamers and their behavior. Simply use the methodology to create with the dreamer further original experience of the dream’s content and you do not need to analyze for personality dynamics using a psychology model, Jungian, Freudian or Gestalt, or otherwise.
Yes, using only methodology the dreamer does develop, become conscious and make positive changes in one’s life. The personality model or theory is not needed.
Yet, in today’s world the psychologies are abandoning using dreams as original working content at all. Imposing a psychology onto the dream and the dreamer is seen not to work, but you do not keep the theory and abandon methodology, do you, or original non-ego generated content which most dreams seem to be?
by Strephon Kaplan-Williams