Dream Interpretation After Jung: Kant, Calvin Hall, and Fritz Perls

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today we have the third installment of our series on dream interpretation that's coming at you today on the Firestone Files. All right, everyone. Welcome back. Super excited to be pushing along in dream interpretation. What a great topic. One that we don't oftent times encounter in the u you know in the wider dialogue in the academy. And so I thought I'd take it on and talk more about it. You remember in the first session we talked about the importance of dreams. The fact that they take up you know they they're you know manifest in a third of our life as we sleep and uh yet we don't really talk about them that often.

When we do it's basically hey that was pretty weird. You know I had a dream about X Y or Z and then it disappears from our discourse. And uh well, we find dreams in places like the Bible and they're kind of really significant. We're going to talk more about the Bible and dreams in the next episode or two. But for this one, I'm carrying on with our philosophical discussions of the sort of way in which psychologists and philosophers have dealt with the issue of dreams. Now, you'll remember that in that first episode, we talked about the importance of dreams. We also talked about the issue of secularization.

This 19th century phenomena that has spilled into the 20th century. And we're kind of living in a uh secular age at this point. And that has created a kind of bifurcation or separation between the sacred and the secular.

And we talked about that in episode one about how that unfolded with the left-wing Hegelians and um some of the freethinking societies and Leo Strauss and really how that permeated the universities and it has led to revisionist histories and we've forgotten the importance of the theological stuff that's outside of us the and the world how meaningful that can be and we really have um uh looked at the individual from the Renaissance and reason and the in the importance of critical thinking and introspection and humanism really in the uh 20th and 21st centuries and that's kind of the condition in which we find ourselves.

We are actually looking in episodes uh the second and third episode here today at philosophers and psychologists from this more secular period.

this place where we are looking at ourselves at the human being for answers in the depths of our unconscious and uh by by doing the kind of transcendental work after Kant we can unpack some of the hidden meaning of dreams now that environment that we live in is really thanks to the philosopher of Emanuel Kant you know I'm a K scholar we'll be talking uh in depth about Kant's philos philosophy later this year but for now I will simply say that Kant's kind of a pivot point a watershed of the modern period where prior to Kant with Aristotle and with uh Aquinus and with Decart and Lach we dealt with the soul as a kind of metaphysical entity as something like for Aristotle that was um a form of the body an essence thing with certain properties. Nutrition mattered to the soul, but so did the intellect and so did the imagination. And so Aristotle understood these metaphysical components of the soul.

Aquinus who's kind of like the Christianized version of Aristotle you might say um looked at the soul as containing the sort of faculties you know this faculty psychology of the soul that it has the intellect and the will and memory and really um when you're looking at those components of the soul and you're having a dream you're really looking at the imagination sort of unfettered as it were by the waking life and the stricters of everyday life. And the goal of the dream interpreter for Aquinus would be to um categorize it.

Is this coming from the inner re uh you know resources of the soul in some way, the imagination that's sort of working out the day's activities or is it coming from the divine realm or from the demonic realm? And so you want to sort of test the spirits as it were for for Aquinus to see what kind of dream you're in fact dealing with. But notice it's metaphysically laden with meaning. This is true also of early modern philosophers like um Renee Deart and Thomas Hobs. For Deart of course we have the Kogito erggo sum. I think they're 4:00 a. m. We did a Firestone file uh actually about five of them on Deart's philosophy. And really the soul is the mind is the most real thing about the human being and the extended mental substance is the body and the two relate to each other in some mysterious way.

But again notice that for Decart the soul is kind of stagnant thing. um it has logic and mathematics in it but these are not active powers. These are sort of just the superructure really of the soul. Similarly for Thomas Hobbes and other empiricists like John Lockach we have this sort of tabloza notion that the soul is a kind of epipenomenon of the uh physical and it is structured by the mathematical realities of sense perception as it encounters the world. But again it um it doesn't have it's it's more like the imagination which is decaying sense.

The the dream for someone like Hobbes would be the quickening within the imagination of the senses in sort of kind of a reliving of the waking life in some chaotic form. All of that's interesting. All of that is really beginning with, you know, sort of metaphysics and just trying to understand using analysis the nature of dreams, the nature of the soul. It's not until we get to the philosopher Emanuel Kant that we actually um get room to analyze the soul per se. Now, it's kind of an interesting outcome because Kant is often times thought as the uh anti-taphysics guy and in a sense he is.

And I I'm going to say anti-taphysics in a very weak sense because he doesn't believe that the critical mind should begin with metaphysics and then work out all kinds of truths about the nature of the soul from that vantage point. No, for Kant, you begin with epistemology. What can I know? And for Kant the first the island of truth. You can know immediate sense perception. You can do science like physics from immediate sense perception using repeatable experimentation and things like that.

And so Kant wants to start there and he wants to go to moral theory from that vantage point. Another transcendental move which we'll talk about when we get to Emanuel Kant. But importantly, and this is why Kant's kind of the watershed for the rationalist and the empiricists, is that he looks as the mind as being operative, having active powers. He calls them the synthetic op priori. These are things that are buried within the mind, but aren't just analytic like logic and mathematics. No, these powers of the mind, space, time, and the 12 categories actively construct human experiences and give the mind a kind of thickness.

It's not just a thin veil or boundary line between the phenomenal and the numinal. No, the mind is a thick thing. It has spaceime in the 12 categories. It also has other uh synthetic op priori conditions that make it up that are discoverable as reason asks questions about its experiences. What are the necessary condition for its experiences? Now, prior to Kant and even with Kant himself, he didn't see dreams as being part of our waking experience, you know, or about part of our experience per se. He saw um things like dreams as being chaotic, malformed, mysterious, not the proper objects of critical inquiry.

And so he didn't think that psychology or the analysis of the psyche or the soul could be done like a science. Now Kant is the beauty of Kant's philosophy by the way because I talk about it with regards to religious faith and r what he calls rational religious faith in some of my writings.

But the same thing applies even to dreams that there's more in the inner recesses of the mind than Kant was able to unpack by the time he died when he was about 84 years old I guess and I worked that out in my writings with regards to what I call rational religious faith but the early psychologists and I say early psychologist psychology wasn't invented really in a in sort of experience uh u um um experimental sense the way we think of it as a normal science where you can do repeatable experiments that wasn't really what psychology was about until about 1879 and we're going to talk a little bit about this guy named Vilhelm Vunt today he's the sort of father of contemporary psychology when we think of it in this experimental sense sense in this scientific sense.

Cotton didn't think we could go there. And so he dies in 1804 and it takes about 75 years before psychology gets its footing as a legitimate experimental enterprise. And so that's a little bit of the backdrop of this. Now what happens after Kant is rather extraordinary. And I'm going to talk about two divergent sort of pathways.

One is with what I would call the neocontians or the transcendentalists and that's the person those are the persons who we talked about in the last lecture the second lecture on dream interpretation that is Freud and Adler and Jung and the reason I say that is because they are looking at this preconcious person or what Freud would call the unconscious um as being an active contributor into the nature of dreams. So just as Kant did a transcendental analysis of immediate sense experience or what you might call the waking life and he discovered spaceime in the 12 categories as operative active powers of the human mind that make experience possible.

These thinkers are going to take a very similar methodology with regards to the experience of dreams. Dreams are as uh we mentioned in the first lecture a genuine experience. In fact, a huge portion of our life is living in a dream world when we're asleep. And yet we don't always remember them. We talked a little bit about why that's the case because they're fragile and so forth. But nevertheless, they're a big part of our experience. And so these thinkers this one on what's called the left side of interpretation after Kant are the depth psychologists and that would be th those who are asking what are the necessary conditions within the unconscious for the possibility of my dreams.

And that's a very interesting question. I I don't know that Kant ever really got that far. And uh that that's a fascinating thing that we tried to unpack in the last lecture and we looked at Freud and we looked at uh Adler and we looked at um at Carl Jung. Now, um the other stream and that's the one we want to talk about today is that of um um Kelvin Hall and France Pearls. I mention these two because these two are less along that sort of neoconteian transcendental line and more along the line of analysis and in a sense phenomenology in a kind of a hybrid relationship.

In other words, they're not so concerned about the transcendental recesses of the unconscious as they are concerned about the dream itself and how you and I experience said dream. not interpreted, not looked at as a repression or a compensation or an archetype, but rather as a manifest dream that is in continuity and not in disconnect with our waking self. And so that's where those thinkers goes. Think of it as the right hand side. The left hand side is a little bit suspicious of our manifest dreams and is looking for the deeper unconscious uh or even superconscious uh elements of our dreams. Um that can help us to unpack what our inner self is trying to teach the waking self as it were. The other says no no no there's direct continuity between your dreams and the waking life.

All you have to do is take it at face value and you can make significant headway. And by the way, you can leverage um experimental scientific methodologies better doing it that way without the mysteries of the descent into self-cognition. And so that's what we want to look at a little bit here um today is this other stream that isn't looking for latent content. Isn't looking for repressed sexuality. Isn't looking for teology of some un untold future. isn't looking at archetypes of the collective unconscious, but instead is just taking the dream on face value and trying to show that there's something being said, just using kind of common sense by analyzing the dream per se.

In other words, with Kelvin Hall and Fron's pearls, what you're basically saying is you don't have to be suspicious of this thing. You just need to sort of make sure you take down the details and understand the fullness of the dream and subsequent dreams and treat them as lived experiences or things that you must live through, not bury an interpretation and self-reflection and descent into these unknown corridors of the human psyche.

That's a very different approach. Now, before I kind of jump into Kelvin Hall and Fron Pearls to try to unpack that just a little bit more, I want to go back uh before um before Sigman Freud and uh and Adler and this the Vienna school to the sort of the father of psychology and that's a fellow named Vilhelm Vunt. Vilhelm Vunt wrote a a very you know famous book in um 1879 that makes the sort of philosophical claim that you can do experiments and establish um psychology as a science by using measuring devices from other fields. And so he points to this thing called the hip chronoscope which measures milliseconds and it's adapted from physiology and astronomy.

And so one thing that V did was something that kind of we all do without even recognizing that we're doing it. I don't know if you've ever played the game where you drop a dollar bill or maybe a $20 bill between someone's fingers and then they if they can grab it, they can keep it. Have you ever have you ever done that one? That's really close to what Vilhelm Vunt was doing in psychology in in 1879. He argued that simple apprehension or you know awareness takes time.

When you see the bill falling to the point where you recognize it's falling and then you squeeze your fingers, there is a certain amount of time in milliseconds. And uh I don't know, you you can be as quick as you want to be. And there's a there's a whole calculus to this by the way. You know, I don't know if you've ever tried to use a timer on your cell phone. You can start it and stop it and see how fast you can do that.

Well, the fastest time that you can start it and you can stop it, that's going to be the amount of time it takes for the electrical impulses to to go from their brain to your fingers, but it still has to start with awareness. So, the fastest time you can do, that's about the time it takes for your mind to react with your body. And some like great baseball players for example when they bat the time from their they make a decision till they actually swing the bat is in super fast and that's what sometimes makes great baseball players but they still take time.

It's not nothing you know there's always going to be amount a certain amount of time it takes to go from the head to the hand. Now, if you were to subtract that from just the awareness of the dollar bill falling to the time that you squeeze your fingers, now you're able to measure the amount of thinking it time it takes to formulate an awareness that the bill is falling. And that's a fascinating insight because for Wilhelm Vunt the mind is a kind of well physical or semi-physical instrument that can now be measured.

It can be measured in terms of time and you can do some of these calculations to actually understand how long awareness takes. And now if you extrapolate that out, thanks Vunt. You could do an experiment where I'm going to flash either a red light or a green light. And I not only want you to move your touch a button immediately, but I want you to touch the right button. So you have to use discernment as well as awareness. And now you can subtract the time of the physical movement of your hand. I mean your body, your thought to your hand. You can also subtract the time of awareness and you can get the actual time it takes to discern the difference between red and green.

And now you can make it even more complicated where you could have red and green, but maybe uh like in a police exercise, you know, when they're going through a a fake building and a person with a gun pops out or a lady with groceries pops out, you have to make a determination very quickly who it is and whether or not they're a threat. Now you've got a third component thrown in the um the awareness, the discernment, and the judgment as to whether or not to fire.

All of these things, and this was the brilliance of Vun's insight in 1879, have a kind of measurable quality to them, which means our psyche, our brain, our soul is measurable and it is the proper object of experimentation. So all of that was rather fascinating and I think it's it's really what's uh uh uh got psychology off the ground. It made it gave it brick and mortar because he started a laboratory in Leipzik. And then of course other people including Freud and Young and Nadler, they ended up in Vienna. And still others, the ones we're talking about today, Kelvin Hall, uh Fron Pearls, um they uh they end up in um they end up in uh in the United States.

And so we get this whole this whole uh this I keep saying France, it's actually Fritz Pearls. Um probably the German name there got the better of me. But anyway, um we have Kelvin Hall and Fritz Pearls and we have these two these two uh uh important thinkers who now are carrying on this experimental method. Now key to note here is that in ep in the second lecture on this dream sequence we had Freud and Jung and Adler they utilize the contian paradigm and less to a lesser degree the experimental side. They used a little more theory and a little less um you know concrete experimentation.

And it wasn't completely true cuz they did do other thing, you know, with Freud free association and and group work and other things that were, you know, in a sense measurable and they did take down notes and all of that, but they didn't really leverage the uh experimental side of psychology in the sense of vent. They really adapted the neocontanian and paradigm and applied it to the inner recesses of the unconscious. Um, but our other folks used or leveraged vaunt in a much more profound way.

Now I will say one more thing about Vunt before we really I think jump into Kelvin Hall and that is he did have challengers even amongst his own disciples early on and one of the main criticisms of Vunt is that yes certain aspects of the psyche are measurable but there are all kinds of thoughts that are imageless that we have that don't seem to have any space-time extrapulations at all. So, some mental acts, judgment and thought itself seem to leave no measurable trace at all. No covering sensation, no image.

And so some of his disciples said that look there's a vast area of the intellect that don't admit to the uh you know the chronoscope or any of the any of the experimental methods that vent valued so highly. And so that created a kind of uh crisis because uh Vunt was trying to get you know away from mere speculation with regards to the unconscious and move it move psychology squarely into the experimental and the scientific. And yet in so doing, he actually reopens the door for at least partially reopens the door for the unconscious being a vital player in all of this that there's something else going on in the human mind that's not strictly speaking measurable.

Anyway, Vun's uh dream theory was really rather simple and so that's why I don't spend a lot of time on Vunt. He sort of he sort of gives brick and mortar to psychology, gives it a department within the university even and it begins to expand around the world from his methodology but there wasn't anything really profound about the outcomes of his experimental methods. Um he the mind is um is basically replaying the waking mental life for and regulating uh you know it doesn't have that regulating anchor of reality that keeps all of our experiences in check. I can't fly. I I can't imagine stuff into existence and out of existence and all of that. Those are checks and balances in the in the waking life.

And the um the dream life is just a version of the waking life without those restrictions for bunt. And so he doesn't add anything really substantial in terms of dream interpretation other than the kind of methodology that kind of gets us going that made possible the two roads that I've been talking about in these last couple of lectures. Okay. So when we get back to Kelvin Hall, he's trained in the Forian tradition and he kind of knew that framework inside and out, but he had some criticisms of the data collection. Now here he is. He's impacted by science, by vaunt uh experimental side of Freud and Jung.

And yet he's not convinced that they have taken the data seriously enough. In other words, they get interpret they get dreams and they utilize their theories, let's say repressed sexuality or archetypal uh uh collective unconscious and they interpret the dreams often times profoundly admittedly. Um but that doesn't that's not really science. That's more like a hybrid philosophy psychology uh uh um interface. It's not strictly speaking scientific methodology, thinks Kelvin Hall. In one level, it's myopic. It's drawn from a very narrow clinical population. And usually for these guys, it has to do with people who are in therapy. They're already self- selected for their psychological distress. And so they do have accentuated experiences and things that are repressed and maybe archetypal stories are present and so forth. But is that really a proper sample set of humanity writ large? So they seems to be myopic a very thin for for Kelvin Hall very thin subset.

It's also anecdotal. It trusts in the veracity of a single individual report filtered through a single analytical theoretical lens. But that seems potentially anecdotal. That is okay. We've got some good stuff here. Lots of meaningful uh dream interpretation. But is this saying something about that particular person about humanity as a whole? It's not always clear because the theory rules the roost rather than the empirical data. Kelvin Hall's a little bit concerned.

Um the uh the third concern is that we only have one dream or maybe it's a small series but he wants a long sort of series of dreams like not just weeks and months but maybe even years to get a sense of a person's personhood and personality and is also looking for many different people so that we can cross compare fair dreams. Um he's looking for a much larger data set. And so his response is to do what nobody had done before. Kelvin Hall said, "Let's massively increase the data set onto a large scale. In that way, we'll have plenty of rich empirical information with which to work." And this is really kind of crucial in his whole approach. So over the core for over his career, he collected over 50,000 dreams and dream reports.

And the majority of those are from ordinary people. And so he creates this huge database and they're not selected strictly speaking from people who are in distress but rather they're selected from ordin ordinary everyday people. And so we have this uh extensive data set but then he took all sorts of personal information from them. What's their what's their uh uh sex? What's their uh age? What's their family life like? what what are the conditions of their life and so forth and able to sort of discern the biographical information relative to this large collection of dreams.

And that's really going to give us a lot more information across the human species with regards to what the dreams are, who's having them, what are they like, what are their character traits, how do we break them up, and so forth. So he does this throughout the 1960s and the 1970s and uh there's a high degree of consistency of continuity across these dreams. So in other words, the peculiarness that we saw in individual dreams even in some of the ones I'm using in my own analysis here like the crematorium or um or like the uh you know jack in the box. Those are peculiar. Could even be looked at by Kelvin Hall as anecdotal.

What you need is to look at all of Firestone's dreams and dreams by other people in let's say similar uh biographical circumstances in order to discern, you know, uh kind of what they are and what they mean and how they relate to people under certain conditions. And so that's a a fascinating approach, not looking at the mystery or the hidden meaning of the dream, but just kind of taking it for what it is and looking at other people like you that have similar dreams and categorizing them and trying to see what kind of commonalities we can see, what kind of rules are in play with our dreams as a human species.

And so one of his outcomes for Kelvin Hall that I think is kind of fascinating is that if you heard if you had all this data on a given set of people, let's say you got 50,000 dream, 49,000 people who had them. Okay? I don't I don't know what the actual subset is of that, but um if you were to hear a dream, let's say a fresh dream from one of the people in this sample set, you should or you would be able to narrow it down pretty quickly as to who had the dream because dreams for Kelvin Hall have a kind of signature to them.

When we get to know the kinds of dreams you typically have, things haul, you can actually anticipate the personality and the personhood through this kind of dream signature. And for him that's a kind of forensic analysis of dreams that is enlightening, that is helpful, that is rooted in science and is not um the sort of uh mystery puzzle that Freud and Jung took uh dream interpretation to be. At least that's how he might frame what they are up to with their more myopic approach to dream interpretation. Oh anyway, he he calls that that whole approach of his he gives it a name. It's called content analysis.

You look at the dream as a verbal text or even a verbal picture and he uses you know he he he really tries to spell out the dream to show its contour, show all the features of it. Who are the characters? What are the settings involved? What are the emotions that you're having? What are the interactions and the relationships that are present in this in the dream? What are the outcomes? Is it a success or failure?

All of those things can be categorized and carefully analyzed so that we can get a sense of what the dream means. So once you code the dream in this way, you figure out where it is on the typography of human dreams. it can be counted, it can be compared and it can be analyzed statistically and that's a fairly big deal for the scientific method and uh it can be sort of placed in a large sample set. And so you begin to see certain rules in play and certain uh uh uh configurations of dreams among human beings. And that is uh what once you place something on the map of say the dream map of the human species, you better understand it.

You better understand what it means. And so Kelvin Hall had a was a was a really important figure in this whole movement. Um he doubted that a single dream could be reliably interpreted at all. But he wanted a dream series and a collection of dreams for human beings so that uh over time you could build a holistic account of the dream the dreamers character traits emotional states and uh and their relational patterns and that that kind of was a a helpful contribution to the field and one that I think still resonate with us as we get more and more data I think with AI and with our ability to um disseminate large bodies of information.

Uh Kelvin Hall's approach is going to be uh as important as it ever was and maybe even more important in the days to come. So for Hall, this is this is not uh this is not, you know, a mystery novel. Dreams are not disguises. They're direct expressions of the dreamer's conception of the self, of others, and of the world. They give expression to what we sometimes call our world view. And um in so doing, he's collapsing the manifest and latent bifurcation that we saw in the depth psychologists. I mean, that's a key distinction for them. For Kelvin Hall, and I think for Fritz Pearls, not so much.

Um, they're really wanting to look at the dreams on face value and show their continuity with our life as we live it in the waking life. So, if you go back to the Jack in the Box analogy, I hesitate to do that because remember, it's a singular dream, but nevertheless, we can say a few things I think that are intelligible about how Kelvin Hall might approach that kind of dream. Um, he wants to say that the dream reveals the dreamer's self-portrait at age 23. It's an exotic setting. It codes for unfamiliar terrain. The dreamer is navigating unknown territory as he's looking for a spouse, for example. And so it's a real simple one toone correspondence between this forest and the unknown territory of going from family life where I was a you know secondb born uh uh you know youngest child in a family of four to now out on my own looking for a significant other.

And that unknown is a pretty straightforward analogy. In my own words, in my dream journal, I wrote, "The jungle might represent the wide and stormy ocean of college life with a particular emphasis on females. I'm wandering in search of answers and attempting to navigate the treacherous terrain." Real simple. It's not going anywhere deeper. It's just saying, "Yeah, the forest is very much a condensed version of that unfamiliar to territory." No. And if I had other dreams in a series, it might be other unfamiliar territories that I dream about that I'm wandering through because of the experiences of a 23-year-old trying to find his way in life.

Um, I'm preoccupied with a woman in this particular dream, but no woman appears in the dream. This for Kelvin Halls is kind of significant. I guess he'd flag it. I think the absence of actual object uh uh an actual object of the concern is part of the data. What does it mean? Well, maybe it means things Kelvin Hall a kind of anticipation, a kind of happiness and frustration that goes that that that is sort of manifest in my waking life.

that is I'm in this unknown realm of singleness and looking for the next stage of life but the other stuff you know is merely a emotional trope really or trajectory of anticipation happiness frustration that goes along with this kind of wandering and in my notes my my dream journal notes I wrote this dream contains a rare exotic setting it shows that I have interest in a woman uh and that I was preoccupied with finding a soulmate. The activity is common in so far as it concerns a pleasurable activity, hiking and exploring. And so really, I'm hiking.

I'm exploring. I'm meeting frustration, exhilaration, happiness, sadness in this mysterious environment. It's not a lot more than that. It's a manifestation of the waking life. So Hall's verdict in such a case might be that uh it's a young person's anxious hope about a romantic commitment. The dream says what it means. There's no excavation required. There's no deeper looking into it or reading into it. That may be fanciful and interesting to do, but it's not necessary to do. Obviously, a whole interpretation of a dream is going to need more data than just that. But I'm trying to give you a sense of how he might approach interpreting a dream at face value.

Kind of like that. Now, Fritz Pearls is our next person. Um, Fritz Pearls is like Kelvin Hall in that he just wants to take the dream at face value. But rather than analyze it in a broad group or be overly scientific with it, he wants us to be existential with it. That is to live through the dream, not do this kind of analytic comparison among human beings. You're naturally going to find for for Fritz Pearls some continuity among our among the human species. But that's not the main reason why dreams occur. Dreams for Fritz pearls are the way in which the personality, the human soul integrates itself into a whole being.

We are living a life thanks for its pearls. And we're living a life that has sadnesses and successes. It has mistakes. It has um uh you know fortuitous events that occur. All of these things are your personality navigating the complexities of life. But one of the things they yield is a kind of fragmented personality as you continue to deal with new things or things that mistakes that you've made or successes that you've gained maybe that were uh you know maybe the successes were greater than you are and your your personality is trying to come to grips with the justice and injustice of life. And this kind of fragmentation requires ongoing growth and integration of your personality.

And so Fritz Pearls uh comes along and says look the dream is a kind of uh um uh soulful way of prompting selfactualization and self-realization. It's giving you kind of cues for areas that would help you to integrate your personality into the hole that it was meant to be. And this is where we get this famous word called gestalt. And that is really traceable to Fritz Pearls. Uh the gestalt is a sense of wholeness of your personality. You are striving through self-regulation to become a whole person. When we think of young people for example, we often times think of them embibing in manifesting the traits of their parents or of their family or of their community of their church.

But one thing we wish for individuals in their growth trajectory is for them to become self-actualized. For them to uh become self-regulating. They could live they can live harmoniously within the community, but they can also live outside the community. And so one of the things we do is we send them away to college or maybe they'll go on a missions trip or maybe they'll spend time overseas. And it's in those experiences that they learn integration of their personality and self-regulation and they become authentic individuals.

Sometimes think of college as a right of passage in this where they're going away from their parents. They're they're they're they're interacting with material that might be new to them and they are figuring it out for themselves. And that's really what uh Fritz Pearls thinks the Gestalt experience is all about. the if the the the person who is really fragmented, who's in therapy, they're going to be using Gestalt therapy to try to help them to go through the layers of personality necessary to achieve personal integration. And so this is where Pearls, I think, made his contribution. So he's the founder of gestalt therapy which basically means the whole the gestalt the whole person.

Um left to itself given the right conditions the personality tends naturally towards wholeness and balance and growth. But we're not oftent times left alone. We are disrupted. Life happens to us and we're jaded or we're disappointed or we're sad or we're overly elated or we become fragmented in real life in this natural growth process of our personality. So the whole is often underdeveloped blocked from its natural self-re regulating movement and that can be environmental factors but it can also be issues of excessive self-control. not allowing ourselves to grow, being stuck. If you've ever had I mean, I've been stuck in life in a variety of ways.

Either stuck in sin or stuck in a way of thinking that I had to be liberated from either to go from legalism to a kind of liberated Christianity or, you know, whatever it is, you can be stuck because of excessive self-control or environmental conditions. And that accumulates internal tensions. These incomplete experiences begin to pile up. They your personality is fragmented rather than integrated. And that's happens to all of us. And we go through layers of change over time.

I mean, if this if if if you're more or less healthy as it were, um you know, you're you're working on your neurosis and you're you're growing as a human being and as a person, well, you can sort of naturally and thoughtfully, you know, progress out of these things. But a lot of people get stuck in these areas. And so, Gestalt therapy, which is what Pearls is famous for, was a way of trying to get people to become unstuck. Um and and so he uses this methodology. Now the stuckness of our personalities can be handled by moving towards authenticity. He says remember this guy's an existentialist. We're going to talk about existentialism down the road somewhere. Saurin Kirkugard and Friedrich Nichze, they're on my radar um as as philosophers that we're going to want to talk about. But the movement towards psychological authenticity according to pearls requires us to go through five layers.

And these layers should sound somewhat familiar to you. The first layer has to do with cliche. He says we oftentimes live and I don't know about you but I find this in myself all the time. We'll say things you know like uh you know beautiful day or how you doing? I'm doing great. How you doing? I'm not really doing great. I had a bad day. You know, we try to break out of these things, but we have limited amounts of times and we're fragmented. We can only live in cliche. And that's for the social good in some cases. It's also for the pragmatism of getting through the day.

But that's the first layer, the layer of cliche that he talks about. This is the surface of the social life. There's a second layer that's common in the social life. It's a little bit deeper than just mere cliche and that is what he calls roleplaying. This layer of the personality is when we intentionally take on different roles. Maybe I'm take on the role of a professor or a husband or um you know a guy who drives a car you know um various roles that we take on that have certain uh traits to them that we play along with and uh we perform these identities again because it's it leads to success.

It leads to agreeableness with other people. We pretend to be someone we think we should be and someone others need us to be. And so this is the second layer. Now, there's a certain amount of wisdom in role play because sometimes you're hired to play a role, you know, or you know, when you go into a restaurant and someone's playing a waiter, you don't want them necessarily to tell you their life's problems. You want them to be a waiter. They're playing a role. And so that's the second layer of your personality, the various roles that you play.

The third layer Pearls calls the no way out layer. And this is where we encounter another more authentically. Kind of seeing where they're really at, but we freeze. And we can freeze for any number of reasons. Um, usually it's a defense mechanism. you know somebody has a series of problems or a story to tell we want to be good listeners but we also want to get out of that you know is they have to live their life I have to live my life and you know we can talk about how to approach such circumstances Christianly or non-Christianly you know but the bottom line is as a human being I tend to want to identify and maybe even empathize somewhat what but I freeze.

I don't know what to do. I I bracket the experience. I I might listen and offer a few trite words and say, you know, I'll pray for you or something along those lines, but there's really no way out of these sorts of things. You you basically block feeling. Um it's the layer of avoidance, of paralysis, of existential stuckness. We're not sure what we can do to help them. If you're like me, and not everybody is, my wife's not like this at all. She's a listener, empathizer, doesn't really get stuck with the no way out layer, but I do because I'm kind of a a fixer. And if somebody is telling me something that I can't easily fix, I tend to want to block it, ignore it, uh uh push it to the side, and you know, call my wife and see if she can help me deal with it. But this is precisely the knee-jerk reaction. That's kind of layer three.

It's a little more authentic than the role playing because you really are who you are. You're interacting by pulling away from uh the other. The fourth layer is the implosive layer. And by implosive it means kind of an inward explosion. And that is you empathize to such a degree that you feel the intensity um of your encounter with other people. All vital energy or your encounter with the world. It's this internalizing. It's this intense emotional feeling. It's condensed inwardly. It's bottled up. The person feels everything with intensity. But the energy is trapped, turned back on itself. The result is a kind of incapacitated deadness. You you you you turn inside, you can barely you're you're shaking.

Your your fists are clenched. It's full of meaning. And yet it's unable to move. So rather than bracket off and push away, this one pulls it inside and implodes on the inside, but you're dead. You can't do anything about it. All you can do is shake. Says pearls. The fifth layer. That's the release layer. That's the one that prompts, as it were, the kind of self-regulating authenticity that we all need. And that's layer five.

And that's the explosive layer. Where the implosive is inward, it's condensed. It has nowhere to go. So, it leads to a kind of deadness. The outward one is energetic. It breaks out. It explodes into grief, anger, ecstasy, or joy. This is the kind of thing we see with Jesus in the temple. It explodes into an authentic response of anger that the temple is being desecrated by um by people selling their wares and other such things. But that happens in our lives all the time. We can only take so much. There uh there was a show called Billy Jack back in the day.

I don't know why this came to my mind, but Billy Jack was this part Indian, part American guy, and he faced a lot of racism and so forth. And he bottled it up inside because he didn't know what to do with it. And that was kind of layer four. He was a layer four master of bottling things up. But there was a trigger which made Billy Jack explode in righteous anger. And that's what made Billy Jack such a fine TV show at the time. And I think it's really playing off of layer four and layer five of uh Fritz Pearl's um analysis of authenticity and of self-regulation.

At a certain point, you can no longer hold it inside. It becomes actionable content and that's when it bursts in grief or ecstasy or some other kind of emotion. The personality regains its capacity for genuine response. We're no longer hiding. We're completely transparent. So Pearls wants you to be the real you. To be present now, present in your body, in your feeling, and in your awareness. And he calls this creating a continuum of awareness, an unbroken stream of present moment consciousness, not filtered through role, defense, and avoidance. And so this continuum is something that the gestalt therapist is trying to walk people through. This is where dreams come in because dreams for pearls are concentrated reflections.

They're not a royal road, as Freud would say, to the unconscious. Rather, they are a royal road to integration of the person. Dreams are the most spontaneous expressions of human existence and personality. He calls them concentrated reflection. And so when you look at a dream for Fritz Pearls, every object within the dream, the whole dream matters. It's all there for a reason.

It's a collage of of of of of condensed personality elements struggling to be uttered in your waking life. So the therapeutic goal is to reown every fragment that is emerging in your dreams to reintegrate every projected part. The dream is complete when nothing in it remains foreign to the dreamer. So what you want to do is write it out into a verbal text and look at every component of that thing as an expression of your uh personality waiting to burst forth and to integrate into your person. And so this is how uh Fritz Pearls understands dreams. And so when the dreamer um has a dream, you want to analyze it as a for what it is, the surface of what it is.

Not for some deeper or hidden meaning but to experience it and to experience each component part of it as a condensed contributor to your integrated personality helping you to become a whole person. I mean that's a really kind of fascinating kind of way of understanding not having to go through the depths of the unconscious or these hidden elements but actually take it for what it is and apply it directly to your personality.

So in the Jack in a Box example, Pearl does not ask what the force the forest symbolizes. He asks, "What does it feel like for you to be the forest right now in this moment?" And so if I were sitting on the couch in Fritz Pearl's office, he'd say, "Fire Stone, pretend that you're the forest. What can you tell me about yourself?" Everything is a mystery. Life is a journey. This place is fundamentally dark. It's lifegiving, but in a mysterious way that I don't fully understand. And I'm like a forest in that sense. I give life and yet it's dark and forboding. And at the end of the day, I don't always know what it means.

Ah, Firestone, you have shared something important about your personality. That sounds like your philosophical side, the one that has open-ended questions and and is okay with that. What if you were the hut, Firestone? Tell me about your personality if you were the hut. Well, I do believe that we can cordon off areas of understanding in our own lives and in the world. That the hut is a safe space. It's a space that things mean stuff. That light is shed. Where I'm covered from the mysteries and profoundities of life and the uncertainties of life and inside the hut, it's all is revealed. It all makes sense in there.

It's it's a space that has dimensions that I can navigate. I can walk without stepping into the mud or getting lost in the force. I know where I'm at. I'm in the hut. And I can do that with philosophy, with particular questions. I can make headway on questions. So, if I were the Hut, I think that's what it would mean to me. Ah, Firestone, this is very good. You can tell me about your personality. It's riddled with mystery. And yet you can grab hold of things just as the hut can reveal things to you.

Okay, F. Now, tell me if you were the Jack in the Box. What might that tell you? Well, it tells me that there's a still small voice in my soul that gives me answers. I call it wisdom. It gives me insights to the hut and helps me to go out into the forest again armed with new insight and it comes when it wants and it goes when it wants. I don't always know if I'm on the right track, but the jack in the box, if I was the jack in the box, would be that still small voice that says, "You're on to something, Firestone. Don't give up.

There's truth and there's goodness and there's beauty out there. go back out there and make a difference in the world. This would be Fritz Pearl's sort of approach. You want to live through the dream as if you were the component parts of the dream. And um I have a couple of quotations from my notes on that dream. Quote, "Mster rainforests are dynamic and intriguing. A hut is like a home away from home and reminds me of the clubouses I used to build as a child. A sanctuary in the midst of the wild world. Sounds a lot like Fritz Pearl's idea of living through the dream.

I also had a note in my old notes on this dream. I instantly wished I had asked some more profound and deeper questions. I wound the box fervishly, but it would not wake up again. I woke up in a stable uh in a state of profound happiness and anxiety. In other words, I had some truth. I could now go out into the forest of life, make some headway, and yet I have so much more I could have asked that might have even given me more headway to make in life. All right. Well, hopefully that's been pretty interesting for you. A totally different trajectory after Kant.

Both of these two movements, the sort of neocontian depth psychologists of Freud and Adler and Jung coming out of Kant and believing that we can do some inquiries into the nature and unveil the nature of the unconscious. And then there's this other group again after this experimental psychology gets off the ground that really wants to leverage the scientific side of it. Kelvin Hall and Fritz Pearl said just look at the dream for what it is and look at your life for what it is and you can either look at other human beings and begin to categorize it and make sense of your place within the world among other human beings like Kelvin Hall or you can live through the experience in the here and now.

existentially and grow in wholeness in your personality and that is no uh simple finding those are two pretty helpful ways of going forward. Now in short then the par the first paradigm the depth we call depth psychology or depth hermeneutics of dreams the dream hides something meaning lies beneath the surface of the dream interpretation requires dissent either into repression or into compensation that we need to make in order to find a way forward or a telos in life or has an archetypal structure lurking in the deep uh collective unconscious. The self is layered, divided, and it's not transparent to itself. It's a it's like a onion.

You have to keep peeling it back until you get at that hidden core. Um the data is going to be clinical cases, particularly unusual cases maybe where we can peer into the inner recesses of the unconscious. It's sort of theologically saturated and laden and needs an expert to help you to unpack it. The other paradigm is called the second paradigm after Kant is this sort of transcending the depths and staying on the surface surface of the dream and this is more halls and perils. Um the dream does not hide anything. The surface is the meaning or the living experience is the meaning. You don't have to overanalyze. In fact, you don't want to overanalyze.

that stuff gets in the way of you actually benefiting from the dream. For Kelvin Hall, it's an analytic process of looking at a variety of human dreams and a series of dreams in your own life. So you want to your dream journal is going to be super important to applying the Kelvin Hall approach and the Fritz Pearl Pearl's approach is that dreams are projected fragments of the self not to be decoded but they're be to be embodied enacted and reintegrated into your person. You need to look at the components of the dream and see them as parts of yourself that are speaking to you.

And so both of these two approaches reject the metaphysical depth motif like the one that was prior to Kant where you're looking at the soul and you're looking at let's say as uh Aquinus does at it being either the self or God or something demonic. really it's getting rid of the metaphysical, the god and the demonic altogether and zeroing in on just the dream itself and our common humanity. And so they're going to reject this metaphysical depth and they're going to sort of ramp up science and the patterns of human experience and move towards embodiment and present experience. Now, really important to note that these are fundamentally humanistic.

That doesn't mean they don't give us a lot to go on and they're not really helpful. I think these theories are helpful. And so when we get to my interpretation, my methodology, my integrative methodology, if you will, for dream interpretation toward the end, I'm going to leverage all of these uh approaches into uh one approach that I will try to articulate. But before we get there, I think we have to re-enchant dream interpretation.

And by that I mean we need to go to the Bible and see how the biblical authors understood dreams first in the Old Testament and then in the New Testament. And I think once we see that it's not necessarily metaphysics in the sort of classical sense. It's biblical, Hebraic, Greek, uh, narrativedriven understanding of dreams that I think we're going to have all the tools that are necessary to land the ship, uh, in terms of dream interpretation toward the end of our lecture series. So, I'm going to leave you with that teaser. We're going to be looking at um dreams from the Bible in the next installment of our dream interpretation series.

I hope that was helpful to you. God bless you and I look forward to seeing you next time. Have a good one. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on Bible. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr.

Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions and remember the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.