What Our Dreams Tell Us: Freud, Adler, and Jung
The Firestone Files: Letters to My Grandchildren — Dr. Chris L. Firestone
July 13, 2026 · Episode 48 · 1:16:11
https://drchrisfirestone.com/episode/what-our-dreams-tell-us-freud-adler-and-jung/

Transcript is auto-generated from YouTube captions and lightly formatted; it may contain errors.

What it is in itself unmediated by the human mind. Only God knows. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the files. Super excited to be bringing you a series of lectures on dream interpretation. As I have been researching this and refamiliarizing myself with a course that I've taught a number of times years ago, um I am just struck by how much good stuff there is here, how important this topic is. And so I'm not going to put an end on this thing. I don't know how many uh lectures that you know talks we're going to have here. It's going to be at least five, maybe six, maybe seven, I don't know, something in that vein.

Today I'm carrying on from our last talk which was on dream interpretation generally why it's important and why we're living in a secularized age or as Charles Taylor called it in his famous book an age of secularization. Um, and we're really just living in a time where science and reason and um, you know, relativity are all ruling the roost. And um, dreams are kind of been taking a backseat for some time now. They were really big in the 19th and 20th century. But uh with the process of secularization and the metaphysical being systematically removed from our uh physical spaces, political, social spaces, but also in our personal conversations, we don't talk about dreams as much as we used to.

But what a significant part of our life. As you know, you're asleep. um you know if you're lucky 8 hours a day a third of your life and that's a lot of dream experience and if you're like me you don't often remember them and so one of the things I mentioned in the last lecture lecture one was the importance of writing down your dreams and uh even a thing that some scholars call dream incubation that is s sort of setting yourself up to have dreams uh will be an important tool I'm going to delay that conversation for later in the series.

I really want to stick in this first let's say three or four lectures with the theoretical side and then we'll move to the more practical side by looking at the Bible, looking at my own dream interpretation theory and then looking at some uh some dreams and how to have them and how to how to journal them and all of that kind of thing. So think of think of what we're doing here is a developmental process of theoretical and practical uh analysis of dreams.

Well, as you guys know, I'm a K scholar. I am going to be doing a detailed sort of lecture, a series of lectures on the philosophy of Emanuel Kant. And uh but I don't think we need to do that prior to this study. We will be looking today at a number of thinkers particularly from the late part of the 19th century on into the 20th century um who are indebted to Kant and so uh very influential dream interpreters in particular we'll be looking at uh Freud and Adler and Jung and uh we won't be able to do a you know sort a thoroughgoing ex Jesus of their work, but we can look at their contributions and apply them to dream interpretation here today.

So, that's a that's a big ask. And so, if this is a little bit of a longer uh lecture, please forgive me. But, uh you know, when you dive into the scholarly side of things and not just the sort of practical and eventladen things, you oftentimes have to give yourself a little more latitude in terms of time and attention. So, that's what we're going to do here today. Now, last time I talked with you about a dream I had that was really formative in my early years, and that was being basically in a crematorium, injected so I couldn't move, ushered into the fiery furnace, and then waking up in a hot sweat. And that was a revelatory dream.

It it it quickened in me something that I was struggling uh with in everyday life. and uh had a real action, real real sort of, you know, actionable plan, you might say, afterwards. Um, and so that was the dream we looked at. And I really wanted to look at that one because it shows the importance of dreams. I had I haven't really shared I probably shared that in class once or twice and I've shared it with close friends maybe once or twice, but really not much. Um, it's kind of a personal dream, but here on the Firestone Files, we get personal, I guess.

And and so I I really want to be transparent with you because the only way we're going to learn together is actually reason together in reality, in real life. And um and so that's what I'm going to try to do. Um so that was that important dream. And um Kant comes along and it's kind of an interesting thing. Prior to Kant um you might say the world before Kant the soul was a kind of um I don't know almost unknowable stagnant thing it worked itself out in everyday life. So if we go back to our discussion of Plato soul was ultimately real for Plato. That is the the idea of who you are.

The soul, the the form or the essence of who you are has all the important stuff. But you only have access to yourself in this world, the shadow of what you are meant to be. And so everything for Plato is about shedding this body of ours and getting back to the universal realm of forms. Aristotle comes along and says the soul in a sense has to be embodied but it's still a form. It's still the sort of essence of who you are. It still has perception, imagination, the intellect and those elements associated with it. But they're worked theirel they work themselves out in this world.

And so the famous Raphael painting with Plato pointing up to the universal realm of forms, that's where your real essence is and your soul is. And Aristotle says, "No, it's down here linked um linked to your body." Um that it has to be formulated, not just a form. It has to be uh wedded, if you will, with matter. But nevertheless, it still has a kind of platonic air about it. It is still something that is complicated, rooted in your disposition in nature and linked to your body in some fundamental way. Um, Aquinus comes along and you know this is just a quick tour of the sort of pre-contian way of approaching um the soul the consciousness the uh non-material aspect of the human person.

Quinus comes along and he has this kind of faculty psychology associated with the intellect and the will and the imagination and it's one of the reasons that by the time we get to the modern period you get this kind of mindbody dualism emerging that the soul and the body are two distinct elements. We know not how they work together. We know we saw that if you listen to my lectures on Renee Kart, you saw that the body and soul are two aspects of the human person. The soul is the more real one because it's the one we're most certain of.

The you know the kito erggo sum I think therefore I am of de cart is really the culmination of that faculty psychology that notion that uh quinus had first uh thought of with the scholastics and so forth that the intellect may well be you know pristine or workable but the will can be weak and so we have this faculty psychology and so we have this sort of understanding of the soul's potentialities its powers.

Um, but we really are examining it through a kind of uh examination of action and of virtue and of logic and so forth. Um, and by the time we get into the modern period, we as I mentioned, we have the Cartisian approach. We also have the what you might call the lockian approach. Uh John lock which really saw us as material entities with a mind that's a tabloza as there's nothing on it. The rationalists believe there is something in the mind. Mathematics and logic are the very essence of the mind. You um what Kant would call the analytic a priori aspects of the mind. But the empiricists like John Lockach felt as though the mind was an epoenomenon of some sort.

It sort of emerges as we experience the world. It has its own traits and its own contributions to human identity and your own personal identity but it is um fundamentally linked in a sense to the material. Okay. Well, that's kind of the background of psychology. Even before Khan psychology was a field it was a study of the soul or the psyche and yet it was in direct indirect study really emergent out of what we could experience in this world and it wasn't experimental at all even when we get to Kant who's going to fundamentally change the epistemic landscape Kant doesn't believe psychology can be experimental the way say physics ics or chemistry are experimental.

But nevertheless, as does happen with great thinkers like Emanuel Kant, he paves the way for a new approach, a new experimental approach to psychology, which is really what we want to talk about here this morning. So what is so new about the contean paradigm? And as we mentioned, everything was pretty stagnant. The mind was something that we could study. The world was something that we could study. And somehow we had to figure out how they went together prior to Kant. But Kant had a kind of Capernac revolution. Sometimes called his critical turn. Those words are mixed up. I'm going to talk about those when I get to Kand, but really it's a Capernac turn.

and and Nicholas Capernicus, as you guys will recall, Polish astronomer looked at the world and said, "Everyone believes the Earth is the center of the solar system, but all of my studies tell me there's more going on and perhaps the sun is the center is a heliocentric solar system rather than a geocentric one." And what that did was it gave us a new simpler and more uh dynamic paradigm for understanding our solar system and really the the entire cosmos.

Um Kant argues early in his critical period that we need a Capernac revolution in our own thinking and this is really what we mean by the Capernac turn or the critical turn. They those often times get mixed up. I'm going to argue when I get to the Kant lecture that the critical turn is different really than the than the capernac term. The capernac term is basically arguing that the mind is not a passive participant in our experiences. that the mind itself contains not only logic and he's going to add to that ethics but logic and mathematics but it is also actively constructing our experiences in the in the conscious world that that we experience.

It's an active organizer if you will. The way the world really is, God alone knows. Thanks Khan. The way the world appears to us, we know. We have direct access to the mind supplies the structure through which we encounter the world. Now, it may well be that there's some continuity between the way the world really is and the way the world appears to us structurally organized by the operative powers of the human mind. But we can't know that's the case because the only access we have to the world is through human reason and the structures and powers of the human mind. And Kant's going to famously argue that there are two fundamental ingredients that the mind brings to all of our experiences.

Space and time, which is really one, they're related to each other. Thanks, K. And the 12 categories. I don't know if that's 14, but it's two areas, right? One he calls forms of intuition, space, and time, and the forms of conception. the um the 12 categories. You might think of space and time as providing the mind with the theater of possible experience. In the 12 categories, putting props and players within the theater of possible experience.

And so we get this famous distinction that the theater of experience what we call nature u is constructed by spacetime in the 12 categories that these things are not real in themselves. They're not intrinsic to nature. They're intrinsic to the mind so that nature appears to us the way it does. And then there's the world unmediated by the human mind. He calls that the numina or the numinal world or the numinal realm. These are things as they really are the thing in itself. He calls it the dinganz in in German. It's forever beyond our direct access. And yet it prompts the experiences that we have.

And so this is the cont paradigm that the mind is active and moving. It provides an epistemic boundary line beyond which we don't know. Only God knows beyond it. He sees the world without the mediation of spaceime in the 12 categories because he's outside quote unquote of spaceime in the 12 categories. He sees things as they really are. But for Kant, the world is constituted by us and our aptitudes, the mind. And so his challenge to psychology is that a it can't become a natural science because it's dealing with things that are not immediately observable. The mind can't observe without distorting what it observes and the inner experience cannot be mathematically quantified.

Well, there's a mathematical component to it or or you can't think at all in consciousness. And yet whatever else is contributing to our dreams don't doesn't admit to direct empirical access. So Kant rather ironically doesn't believe that psych a psychology of dreams a dreamology can really ever be constructed because we don't have direct access repeatable access to our dreams. Um well the irony of that of course is that in talking about the mind as an active contributor to our experiences he opens up this transcendental realm of the mind for new theoretical paradigms for understanding how it's structured. We have space time in the 12 categories.

Those things give us the possibility of immediate experience. But what are the necessary conditions for the possibility of dream experience? That additional experience that we all admit that we have but we don't fully understand. And that's an interesting question and it's a question that thinkers after Kant are going to ask. And now if you just reason with me a little bit more, we have a dream. I've already talked about one dream, this dream of being in a crematorium, and that's the uh sort of uh manifest dream, the one that is right there.

But what are the necessary conditions in the human mind that made the manifest dream, what some of these postcontian theorizers call the latent dream, the one that's kind of hidden beneath the surface of the manifest dream? What are the necessary conditions for this dream to be possible and what must lurk if you will below the surface of our experiences? And so um we have this active structuring of the mind that Kant talks about it. But we also seem to have an open door of sorts for theorizing thinking about what other contributions the mind might be making.

Well, before I jump in any further to thinkers that are definitely in line with the philos the reception of Kant, if not Khan's own position on these things, I thought I'd relate one more dream to you that I'm going to be using kind of as an example here. I call this my Jack in the Box um dream. Again, this was in my early 20s. I had this dream and um again I was not married. I was um you know out looking as it were trying to find my way in life, trying to find a vocation, trying to find a significant other who would like me for who I am, but I'd also like her for who she is.

And uh really dealing with everything that uh young people deal with. I oftentimes tell young people and I deal with them all the time um and that is you know the hardest years of your life are actually your 20s in my estimation and it's they're hard especially if you're a thinker because you realize just how significant the decisions you make in your 20s are and they sort of extrapolate out for the rest of your life. And so I think young people kind of intuitively know this. They're looking for mentors. They're looking for guides.

And um when we dream, I think we're often times kind of looking for something more, help maybe or clarity or perspective on things that we're dealing with in the waking life. Well, anyway, that's a little bit about some of the context of my early 20s. But in the dream um I was uh walking in a lush rainforest. I mean really lush, you know, you could feel the dampness almost in there and this big leaves and and green trees and just uh just a really full forest. Couldn't see anything around it. Um and um I come across a hut. My memory of the hut was that it was kind of elevated.

maybe I don't know 4 feet or so above the ground. Had a had a had a straw staircase really. It was kind of a straw hut with I don't know what over the top of it. Maybe it was straw over the top of it just laying across it. And um I immediately uh went inside, climbed the stairs, went inside the hut, and the only thing in there to my recollection was um a table. And in this, you know, like a square table, and in the center of the table was a Jack in the Box, a pretty big Jack in the Box. And um I uh I immediately knew what to do.

You know, I've seen Jack in the Boxes before. There's a restaurant called uh Jack in the Box. And so I immediately go up to it and wind it up. Boom. pops out a clown-like figure, you know, about the same size as the box, but just extended out of the box. And he's wobbling around kind of like this. And he said, "Ask me anything you want. Anything you want." And I immediately knew, I kind of intuitively, I guess, I don't know how I knew this, that this guy would tell me the truth on any question that I asked him. And I asked him what I took to be the most important question.

Will she marry me? And the Jack in the Box said yes. And he fell limp kind of over the box. And I immediately said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What? Yes. I that's that's incredible. But I I got more questions." So I start winding the box. and the jack the jack outside the box um didn't have any more life in them and so I left the room went down the stairs and left and woke up soon thereafter. Well, uh, just a little more context. At the time, I I had a crush on somebody in my undergraduate days. And, you know, as every young person does, I think maybe she might be the one, maybe she would become my wife someday.

Um, you know, we were friends, but, you know, I had hopes of more and all of those kinds of things that young people typically deal with. Um, and uh, this dream was I guess some kind of consolation for me, man. Not only do I have a shot at this, but I I think I've got it. She did not become my wife. In fact, I don't even think we ever dated. Um, but the dream never left me. It's stands today as uh, a remarkably clear dream I once had.

Well, let me talk a little bit more about those dream interpreters. Now, we've gotten our way through K. We have a dream before us. How are we to understand dreams? Well, if you say the word dream in public, what's the first scholar that comes to your mind? If it's like if you're like me, it's going to be Sigman Freud. And uh Sigman Freud is famous for a variety of reasons. He's an early mover in dream interpretation um in this new sort of postcontian a little bit more scientific approach to dream interpretation but he's also very much indebted to Kant um and he does so by sort of reinventing the Kian framework in a more in psychologically friendly terms you might say.

So Freud's one that we're going to be talking about. I think the other person who is oftentimes kind of right on the heels of Sigman Freud would be Carl Young. Um Carl Young is a student of Freud's um by the way you might call today's lecture I mean a subtitle of this thing might be the Vienna school of interpretation because these guys all had some time at least in Vienna Austria. uh Freud being the sort of godfather of this group and then um and then the rest of them and in some ways his students even surpassed him. But there's Freud and then there's Carl Jung kind of right in the middle of those two. I would add another person from the Vienna school's name is Alfred Adler.

And these guys I think are a very instructive um triplet of thinkers in this sort of content stream. Maybe you could maybe in contemporary jargon we could call it the continental stream. In the next lecture I hope to look at a more Angloamerican stream. Although it's hard to escape the Germans and the continent but excuse me but we will escape in the next lecture but today we're going to talk about Sigman Freud Alfred Adler and Carl Young. Now with Sigman Freud, the conscious the the sort of conscious world is the manifest is the ego if you will. But then there's this unconscious and this is every bit as real and if it's like Kant maybe it's the really real.

It's the unconscious. It's powerful and it's hidden from the conscious world by design. You can only handle the conscious world. Even that has enough trouble of its own. But for Freud, the unconscious world is even more dastardly, more chaotic, more difficult. The conscious world brings order, as Khan does, to nature and to science, into our approach to the world. The unconscious world is that chaotic underbelly of the conscious world. And for Freud, I think his key insight is that dreams are manifest experiences from the unconscious that we wish would happen. Sometimes his theory is called wish fulfillment theory. The psyche uses dreams to discharge repressed desires that cannot be expressed in reality.

And there's a whole litany of these desires, but the the constitutive one you might say for Freud is the sexual desire. Now being a guy and we all know guys I don't know what the law what they like think about sex every seven seconds or something like I've heard statistics on that for it's going to be hard to uh to to uh argue against if indeed those things are true particularly for men but maybe women too. I I don't purport to know the woman's mind as much as the male one. Um but it is explanatory. It's it's hard to even utter a word with a male psyche and not think of some sexual connotation or a sentence uh with some sexual connotation associated with it.

Um and so we have this manifest content. The dream as you remember it with Freud is a story, there's images, there's a a kind of narrative thread running through it. And then there is the unconscious the more chaotic hidden repressed realm that gives rise to the dream itself. And so the dream work, if you will, is the work that the mind does in bringing the unconscious, repressed, chaotic realm of desire to an orderly form that can you can even have a dream at all.

And it it um it it transforms this latent content into manifest content which is the dream itself. And so there are certain words he uses uh that help to unpack that process of going from latent content to manifest content. One of them is condensation. Multiple ideas are compressed into a single image. And so he's going to be the guy who wants to use free association to try to unpack those original sort of multiply expressed ideas into a single image. There's displacement. The emotional change shifts uh is shifted from the true object to some other object. And so you get it kind of putting these repressed desires into some other object.

um so that it doesn't have to confront them directly. And then there's symb symbolization. Forbidden content is disguised as something else. Maybe something innocent like a jack in the box or something like that. And so for Freud, there's this symbolization of this condensed displaced content that um then becomes the manifest dream. And Freud's interpretive posture then is always going to be something of suspicion. The dream is not what it appears to be. Similarly, I mean, if you want to relate it back to Kant, you know, I got a I got a I got a cup here in front of me right here, and it appears to be a cup.

And yet what it is in itself unmediated by the human mind only God knows. It manifests itself to me as a cup. And I can manipulate nature because of these manifestations. But what they really are are hidden to us. And it's similar with manifest dreams. He's suspicious of them. There's something more down there. And this is where I think the psychologist in line with Freud is going to be different than Kant because Kant doesn't want to say ever that you can know what lurks below the surface of the appearance.

Similarly with our dreams, Khan's going to want to say, "You can have a dream, but you cannot get back underneath behind to these repressed unconscious sources with anything like critical knowledge." And so he Khan's kind of like, "Let's not make a science out of this. It's only going to confuse us." Um, but the people after Khan thought they had more resources with the psyche than we do with immediate sense perception. And to be honest, they might be right.

Similarly, Kant had a number of strictors and I've argued this in other writings I have and I'm going to argue it again when we finally get to Kant that his notion of faith for example has a kind of deeply moral intuition to it and yet further developments with Kant's own thinking shows his the tools that he gives us to be useful in developing rational religion. religious faith into something more robust and more compelling. So, I'm going to make that argument later on, but Freud has the same intuitions with regard to dream interpretation. And um you know, he writes this book in 1900. It's a really kind of cool date, 1900, you know, um called the interpretation of dreams.

This is his master work where a lot of what I've just discussed is laid out and it becomes really the basis for that Vienna school of dream interpretation. Um now when you know when we get over to Adler and Freud they're going to show up on the scene in Vienna some five to eight years after this book is published and they're going to spend time there and become disciples of Freud. Um, and so this is kind of the kickoff of all of these things.

Now, if we go back just for a moment by way of application to the Jack-in-the-Box interpretation, I mean, Freud's interpretation of the Jack in the Box theme, we immediately see some rather intriguing uh condensations, symbolizations, um, and displacements wrapped up in this dream. First of all is the forest. The forest for Freud would symbolize the womb descending deeper and deeper into the unconscious. This is not uncommon. And a number of dream interpreters we're going to look at down the road will look at water and look at forest similarly as a deeper descent into the unconscious. So that's that's not that's an early move if you will in psychological theory, but it's going to be one of the more accepted hypothesis. But the fact that it's not only a deeper dive into the unconscious, but it's also symbolic of the womb is distinctly Freudian. The foliage is feminine.

It's maternal. It's um moving back to the earliest manifestations of our psychic theory. Thanks, things um Freud in my notes on the dream. These are notes that I wrote, by the way. So, I'm going to quote myself here. These are notes I wrote 20 years ago or whatever. I'm older than that. Uh I think I wrote them down when I was recalling the dream for my dream interpretation class. They are probably notes are probably 20 years old, but the ideas are more like 40 years old. Okay, I wrote in my notes, "The forest hike shows me going deeper and deeper into my unconscious.

The foliage represents the female womb, either my mother's womb as I travel back in time to my earliest memories, or femininity in general. The hut is the paternal home. It's a sanctuary. It's a sight of the father figure. It is in a sense interjecting or penetrating into the forest. I go there and I'm seeking the all knowing male who can mentor me, help me to answer the questions that I'm raising. Jack is the father figure. He's a phallic symbol. Thinks Freud, a figure who rises and falls, who gives one answer and then is spent.

I have to say it has some explanatory value to it. In my notes, I wrote, and I'm quoting myself again, Jack represents both the only male figure who I use for information and then kill. Jack is also a phallic symbol that goes from limp to erect to limp again once I have extracted all the information that I need. So you can see I was already analyzing this dream in Freudian terms even back in the class uh when I first taught on some of this material.

So the question itself I raise will she become my wife is a manifestation of a uh or of a deeper thing something going on in my unconscious a more primal desire that cannot be stated directly can I make love to this woman would be will I will I ever you mean this would be the Freudian sort of unconscious desire manifesting in this question of will she become my wife? And yet there's a deep frustration by the time it's over. I was whining and whining trying to get more information out of the Jack in the Box, but I'm left wanting more. And Freud will see this as fundamental.

The the the uh the id, as he puts it, is never ever satisfied. Um, I think one of the key things to note about Freud is that the dream is always a reading of downward deeper into the unconscious, but it's also a reading backward. It may deal with manifest experiences and manifest dream content, but it is particularly adept at looking backward at past desire. The crank, the forest, the oracle of Jack in the Box all become signs of something repressed and hidden.

The dream is not about the girl. It's about something much more primitive, primal, sexual, instinctual, whatever the right word is. And so Freud's helpful. I can't deny that those things may be present in some capacity. The question is whether or not it's constitutive of the dream or using Kantian language. The Kant has another word uses word constitutive. Things that are in the mind that constitute experiences like space and time and the 12 categories. Those are constitutive of our experiences. Is repression the unconscious sexual desire are those constitutive of our dreams as Freud argues or are they merely as Kant would use uh he has a different word that he sometimes uses for things in the mind which he calls reflective.

Are they reflective? Maybe they say something about the meaningfulness of the dream. We can reflect on it. There's some truth there perhaps, but it's not constitutive of the dream per se. Well, that's a question that we need to think more about. And that brings up my second thinker here. And I bring him in the context of Freud at this point for a couple of different reasons. Alfred Adler was a student, if you will, of Sigman Freud. He studied with him. He worked with him in Vienna.

And yet, I believe it was in 1911, let me check my notes on that. I believe it was in 1911 or 1912, in that range, that he had a fundamental break with Freud. Yeah, that's what I have here. Um he split over uh o over um the whole notion that sexual behavior was the primary drive in dream interpretation. His emphasis was less on that fact than it is on the future. Adler is not primarily driven by repressed instincts in his interpretation. He had seen the interpretive value of this. But in using casortant words, Adler thought they were more reflective and less constitutive of dreams. For Adler, the more constitutive components had to do with being pulled forward by your goals.

So if Freud is looking backwards towards repression, Adler thinks we're looking forwards towards, I don't know, revolution or release or freedom or opportunity or prospects, something more along those lines. We do for Adler have an inferiority complex. And this inferiority complex may have may start or at least be uh partially uh um constituted by sexual repression. But it's not just that. It's vocation. It's fitting in. It's uh selfidentity.

There are a number of things for Adler which essentially are elements of this more complex concept of an inferiority complex and the fundamental human drive towards superiority towards rising out of the chaos of inferiority of not measuring up. This is not an arrogant thing for Adler, but in a sense, it's a striving to overcome, to achieve significance in this world. So Freud's looking backwards at those repressions. Adler's looking forward towards new possibilities. So dreams for Adler are not sexual repressions, but are teological in orientation, future oriented, goal oriented, not rooted in the past. It's escaping from the past for Adler. The dream rehearses and reinforces the dreamer's style of life.

I mean, you can already see. I mean, I like to, you guys know me in the Firestone Files. I like to get out in the world. Like to experience things as they're really happening, to contemplate them in action. And for Adler, that's going to manifest itself in this adventurous dream of going through the forest, of being able to ask an oracle a question that has a direct bearing on my future. Dreams don't hide meaning. They prepare you for action, thinks Adler.

They are the psyches rehearsal stage. They're the place where you visionize, if you will, what you're going to do in the waking life. What seems to be defeat and frustration in the dream is often times psychologically preparing you for a counter move in the regular life. Adler calls this compensation. They It kind of sets you up, as it does in this dream, for failure. I mean, well, it says I'm going to succeed, and yet there's frustration on all sorts of other areas that are involved in the dream, but it builds in you in waking in the waking life a sense of hold on a second.

I can't let this happen. I can't let this happen again. I've got to move forward and so forth. So if we look ex at the Jack in the Box dream through Adler's eyes, the dreamer is clearly striving. The dreamer is striving in my case for love, for certainty, for knowing. You know, here I am living in my early 20s, thinking to myself, man, it'd be great to have a woman, but not knowing if I'll ever find one. looking for a place that isn't just a wandering guy in an apartment but a structured and ordered social life. This is the fundamental drive that Adler thinks is in play here. So the question asked of the oracle is not agre oracle is not a regression for Adler.

It is the goal marriage as significance, as completion, as a demonstration of social order. Um, as the culmination, as the telos of all of these experiments in our youth of meeting women, meeting uh people, envisioning a future, having frustration, not having it work out, all of this stuff that comes in your early 20s generally and um and is in play, but it's all future oriented. The psyche is saying you cannot outsource your striving. You must act. I mean that's essentially here. Look, if she's going to marry you, then ask her and she'll say yes or she'll say no. But at least you'll know and you can move on.

And this is what Adler says is being prompted here by dreams like the one I related to you about the Jack in the Box vision. So, uh, in my notes at the time, I wrote, "I felt stupid and overwhelmed by a feeling of a missed opportunity. My psyche was telling me that things of my youth must be dealt with and gotten over, but that I should now turn the corner and get on with the problems of life and humanity." So those are some of my notes with regards to sort of an Adlerinian interpretation of that dream.

Adler would read in other words uh the wasted question not as a failure but as a compensation I was able to do in my dream what I wasn't able to do in the waking life. It had a result and the dreamer's deeper goal is not to know whether she will be my wife. It's to be it is to transcend the question and find a larger purpose in all of this. And so the frustration I felt wasn't elation. I should have been elated, right? Elated that she said yes. And the oracle knows she's going to say yes. And yes, this is a great thing. But the frustration I felt was that I wanted to transcend even marriage to a larger purposiveness in this world.

So Amler is going to be the most optimistic of the three people we talk about here today. H says dream is a forwardleaning instrument even when the imagery is frustrating. It allows that frustration to work itself out in your dream. You wake up with it. you. I remember actually being frustrated with myself having asked such a poignant and patently simple question when I had an opportunity to ask any question I wanted. There was a frustration when I woke up for sure. But the frustration itself is the message for Adler. Stop looking for the answer to be handed to you. Get out there and make it happen. So Freud descends into the past and Adler reaches out into the future.

We're going to get to Carl Young now and Carl Young does something completely different. He still descends Allah Freud, but not into personal history, repressed memory and so forth, but something still deeper, much older, you might say, much more social, communal than the sort of individuated, repressed sexual desires of Sigman Freud. As you can see, if Freud was really wedded to his ideas in Vienna, it must have been quite the uh the breakup both with Alfred Adler, who had a directly opposite viewpoint, starts his own school, as it were, and and um Carl Young, who says, "Yeah, Freud, great try, but you missed something even deeper."

You know, those are things. One thing you learn, this is just a little side note before we go forward. One thing you learned in the academic realm, if you're here long enough, that all of these guys, maybe even me, I don't want to say I'm out of this, maybe I'm one of these guys, but they're all narcissistic to some point or another, they all think they've got the answer. They want to universalize it, that they are the first movers, and therefore nobody can have a good idea after them. I know I've experienced that with scholars that I've relied on in the past.

It's hard for them to let go of you and um and you know, but just like Adler, just like Jung, I had to break away and do my own thing. By the time you get out of your PhD, you're kind of like released to do that anyway. But sometimes your mentors or other people who are significant in your life don't want it to happen or don't think that you should or can transcend them.

And this is the case with Adler and with Jung and this is why that breakup in Vienna must have been something majestic to behold. I don't think they ever spoke to each other again or at least very minimally from what I understand. Um Freud does do his own thing. Adler and Jung do their own things. Now, should be noted here that um that uh Adler and Yung are very different and so they don't break away together. They break away to start their own uh systems of thought, dream interpretation schools, you might say. So Young kind of sticks with Freud but a little closer to Kant than Adler ever was.

Adler was probably the least contient of these three although he's still coming out of this continental millu. Jung accepted the reality of the unconscious but radically expanded it. It's not just these repressed memories. the personal unc unconscious repressed material forgotten experiences and so forth. Yes, he's similar to Freud in that regard. But for Jung, there is, you may have heard of this term before, the collective unconscious. This is a deeper layer of shared across humanity populated by archetypes.

And so archetypes as you know are these perennial stories that human beings participate in. They are traits of stories that are so common to the human condition that we replay them in different circumstances over and over. And for Jung there you you have these elements that Freud articulated. But you have deeper still a common humanity, a common consciousness, a deeper layer of the unconscious, the the the the collective unconscious, if you will. And it's there that we find the true source of our dreams where they sort of their constitutive underpinnings you might say. And so you may have heard of some of these archetypes. The shadow which would be the sort of hidden and and um disowned parts of the soul.

Thema or animus the the contraexual aspect of the human psyche. If you're male, you tend to have thisma. This is a a female component of the deeper aspects of the unconscious that complements. They don't constitute your waking self in any great extent, but they act as kind of a an additional voice or contraosition of a kind of deeper unconscious wisdom, if you will, that in a sense communicates with your unconscious. And um you know in in in men this typically will manifest itself as a mysterious woman, a mother or a guide or a wise heavenly figure. And you can see where I'm going with this. For for for Yung, the Jack in the Box in this dream is not a male, you know, uh a symbol.

The deeper meaning of it is thema, the female component of uh of the dream that is trying to give you some wisdom, some some kind of uh interlocator, if you will in the unconscious that's manifesting itself as a jack in the box. And so I mean that's an interesting insight. You can see why Jung and Freud aren't going to agree on exactly where the meaning is coming from.

Is it coming from the repressed sexual desire or is it coming from something still deeper this collective unconscious which is this contraexual aspect of the human psyche interesting the wise old man or the great mother figure is a is a is a direct sort of guy sort of perennial archetypal you know it's like the Yoda figure if you will in the in the uh unconscious the self the archet a type of wholeness, the organizing center of the dream. So for Carl Jung, there's a process of individuation that's going on. This is the lifelong process of integrating the unconscious into the conscious self, becoming who you most fully are.

And so when I teach an introduction to philosophy, I sometimes teach on Joseph Campbell because Campbell is a great c sort of a theorist in this area as well. He talks about archetypes in particular particularly famous the hero with a thousand faces. He talks about the the the archetype of the hero or the hero myth. And so for young These archetypes are striving for individuation and and signification in an individual's life as you work out the hero's journey for yourself. And so you'll get a figure who's a wise figure or a womanly figure as a counter uh a contraexual uh voice of wisdom to help the male essence deal with life in the conscious world. And it's all a striving after wholeness.

These great stories are meant to help smooth out the rough edges of our life narrative and for us to individuate ourselves. Dreams are compensatory and guiding the unconscious offering what the consciousness lacks and compensating as it were and guiding you toward dreams of wholeness and self-standing. And so interpretation is a symbolic, not a reductive thing. The image points to something transpersonal, not just a personal history. It's about you fitting in to the great story of humanity. And so Carl Young is going to kind of take Freud and press him one step even deeper. Um, so if we take Jung's insights, at least as we have them here, and look back at the Jack in the Box through Jung's eyes, the rainforest is the unconscious itself.

A vast organic, alive, numinous world of the unconscious. Who knows what you might find in that forest? It's not threatening, but it's primordial. It's ancient. It's something that you can adventure into and actually find something that will help you to identify who you are and how to become who you were meant to be. And so the hut is um a sacred space within that place, a place where you actually find something or someone. It's set apart.

In many cultures, there's a holy place that you go. Even in religion, there are holy spaces that you go. Maybe it's a shrine, maybe it's a sanctuary, maybe it's a a place where you pray or you go to that is untainted by moral depravity or uh the cares of the day. And the dreamer in this case moves from the wild forest into that sacred space. Jack in the box figure of course is either the wise old man archetype, the oracle or the guide. Or it's thatma figure, you more female. If we if we lean into Freud, we'll keep it the wise old figure, you know, maybe we can't have our cake and eat it too, but maybe we can.

I don't know. Um, it's the oracle or the or the guide. It's the one within the holy space who knows. It's the priest, you might say, of the unconscious. It's not a personal f father figure, more of a transpersonal figure that will help you to understand how you fit into humanity, how you fit into the greater good or the greater whole of the human story. So when I asked the question according to Jung, will she become my wife? Um, it has personal content, but Jung says this is the literal question concealing the deeper archetypal question. The dreamer senses uh this himself.

And so, will she become my wife is merely a prompt for the wise old man to give us something more to go on. The missed opportunity that I felt I should have asked something deeper is the y-in moment. The psyche is proddding the dreamer towards individuation. There are bigger questions. It's leading you or leading me at the time to not be so punctilier or so focused in on one issue that I'm striving for, but to think more broadly about my life. Does it even matter if I get married? If I get married, that's a big decision.

Will it fit with the other things I've got going on in my heart and in my mind and as it relates to the world as it appears to me? I wrote in my notes at the time, "Jack represents the oracle, a divine spokesperson, and someone who will tell me the truth. Perhaps Jack is something like a genie in a bottle. And yeah, I I had that feeling when I woke up at the time that I had a genie and he gave me one wish and I wish to know if she would be my wife. My goodness, what have I done to myself? That was the feeling I kind of had.

Another note that I wrote, the moral of the story is when you get the chance to speak to God, don't ask him what time it is. Ask God questions that matter. My psyche was telling me that things of my youth must be dealt with and gotten over, but that I should now turn the corner and get on with the problems of life and humanity. The whole dream for young is an individuation prompt that there is a story to be told in your life. Get over these individual successes and failures. Yes, they do add up to something, but they're one thing among many, if you will.

The forest, the hut, the oracle, the frustrated return. It's the hero's journey in miniature. Um, get on with your life, man. Interestingly, the one that really hit home for me was the was structurally a Yungian interpretation. I really did feel like what the dream was telling me was that you shouldn't ask short-sighted questions. I wasn't I wasn't I don't believe at that time I had actively well I had become a philosophy major. I may have been leaning in in my soul toward becoming a philosopher. I know that would be a long road from there. But there was something about that even that primordial early trajectory that I was on that was telling me how dumb were you man. I I remember for a time after. So I remember the dream so so vividly was I really felt like I had an oracle.

How many times in life do you meet an oracle who will tell you the answer to a question? And what an idiot I was to ask such a short-sighted question. Now, if there are any ladies listening to this dream interpretation uh theory, you're probably saying that was not a short-sighted question. It's a very important question telling you to pull up your bootstraps and make a commitment to a woman. I don't deny that that was present there as well. But I had a distinct feeling. The dream that clicked for me or the interpretation that clicked for me was a young one was that my story shouldn't be defined by short-sighted questions but rather bigger questions.

So what did I learn from these three figures that we've talked about Freud, Adler, and Jung? We've learned, I believe, that the psyche has depth. consciousness is not transparent to itself in that the dream is revealing something to us about what's inside of us. Kant has a very famous quote that you I already said Kant wasn't going to allow dream interpretation or even psychology to get off the ground as a as a science just given what he had known about the nature of science.

But uh he does have this quotation that I cite in one of my books. Um he says wisdom is the descent into the hell of self-cognition. In other words, when you really begin to know yourself and dig into the deeper reaches of yourself, that's where wisdom is to be found. And one of the things we've learned from all three of these interpreters is that there is this unconscious realm. There's something else going on in the human mind deeper into the soul, you might say, that is not immediately transparent in the waking life. And it can help us to um reflect on these things.

And so we're going to be doing more of that in later lectures here, reflecting on how these Freudian ad linear and yungian concepts can help us interpret dreams. But that's one thing we've learned here in this early study. Dreams are meaningful and structured, not random noise, but organized expression. So you may go with Freud to say that it's primarily a sexual manifestation, or you may go with Adler and say it's primarily a future oriented compensation. Or you may go with Young and say that it's primarily a quest for wholeness.

rooted in our collective unconscious of our common humanity. Yeah, you may go that way, but in any of three those three cases, it's a structured organized expression of yourself, yourself as a human being. And that's going to be significant, I think, to our dream interpretation discussion. The dream is not the final layer. There's always something beneath the surface of the image. Now again, we have some disagreement on what lurks beneath the surface of the image in the case of these three thinkers, but they do give us pathways to go to check out. I just went hiking with my wife and uh up in the Hot Springs Mountain and and we have the beaten path as it were.

But occasionally we see these beaten paths that go we know not where. Sometimes my wife and I will go down them for a while. People are going there for a reason. And I kind of see that as an illustration of what these three thinkers can help us with. Um they show us that there are other pathways roads less traveled that may well have some hidden gems in our own self-standing. And that is no um that is no uh little insight. That's it's a big insight. Um and lastly what they all share I think what we can all agree on is they all reject the cartisian self that we are in a sense inert objects. The self is not moving. It's just logical and rational.

It's not active and moving. I think all three of these thinkers are conte in the sense that they're capernic and they believe that the earth is in motion around the sun and the mind is in motion in constructing our experiences. And uh that's a deep insight I think that we've learned here from these uh I guess continental orient uh psychologists of dream interpretation.

They do diverge however and they diverge marketkedly and I put up on the board behind me I don't know if you can see it um but uh they they uh they do they do have differences and those are going to be important to understand not necessarily I guess I'm going to make an argument here at the outset that all three have some truth to them that they all give us a sliver or a pathway to explore or and it may well be that one of these pathways is in fact the optimal or operative pathway. But if you don't know about the pathway, well, you're never going to get to where the pathway leads. And that is a deeper or more meaningful account of what the dream is. Um there what some scholars call the hermeneutics of depth. They help us to read more deeply into ourselves.

The interpretation is always something to be analyzed and gone after and not just accepted in its manifest form. Um the interpreter's posture of course different uh their sort of instincts about this deeper realm differ. Freud is suspicious of it. He thinks that it's uh it's hiding something and he uses, you know, this technique of free association to try to get at what it's hiding. Adler thinks that it's not suspicion that marks the inner workings of this deeper realm of the unconscious, but it is instead aspiration. It's about us wanting something more. And then Yung, who many people today I think thinks is the most profound of the three?

I'm not sure I totally agree with that, but maybe I do. I mean, there's there's some facets to Jung that I think are absolutely phenomenal. But Jung thinks that this unconscious realm that we've been studying here together focuses not on suspicion or aspiration but on relevance. We want a meaningful life. We want to be whole. We want to understand ourselves. And Young thinks that's the primary move that's being made in the unconscious as it expresses itself in dreams. All right. Well, we're going to be moving on here. I think we've talked enough about these things. We're going to be moving on next time in episode three of this content.

I don't know what episode it will actually be on the Firestone Files, but uh we're going to be recapping this sort of contean trajectory and um summarizing it. We'll look at the Jack in the Box theme from a different angle, however, and that is the angle of uh another more experimental realm, more of a realm of empirical science that we see in thinkers like Kelvin Hall and France Pearl and others. So, look for that. That's going to be a key contribution to this discussion going forward.

Once we have that in hand, um my plan at this point is to look at biblical dreams to see how they uh how important they are in in the in the narratives there and then talk about how we can bring dream interpretation all together into an organic hole. Um but we'll look at some more dreams together. And I really think they're helpful to seeing where the rubber meets the road as we interpret dreams uh real dreams and uh using some of the great dream interpreters um that we have access to. So look for that coming up in the next episode.

All right. Well, that's it for now. Hope you enjoyed this edition of the Firestone Files. Look for me next time in part three interpretation. Bye for now. 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 life. 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.

Turn it around.