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Dreams and the Search for Meaning
Looks at the history of dreams, discusses the work of Freud and Jung, and explains how dreams can help one get in touch with the unconscious mind
- GenresPsychology
247 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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July 1, 2020
My first reading of Dreams and the Search for Meaning was over twenty years ago. At the time I was entering on a journey of deeper exploration of dream work and picked this book up while browsing in a store out of an interest in absorbing some wisdom and insight from those who have tread this path ahead of me. Recollection of details have faded, but I do remember enjoying the book and found that lent a perspective that was novel and resonated with my intuition about approaching dream work with humility and respect.
Recently I've started the process of culling (or Kondo-ing) books from my shelves, but decided to hold on to this one to give it an opportunity for a reread, chiefly to calibrate whether or how far my own perceptions and philosophy about dream work may have evolved in the intervening twenty years. Unfortunately I have less to recommend about the book than I would have had I written this twenty years ago.
First the good parts: O'Connor cites that his philosophy and approach is derived on experience he gained from participating in "dream circles" for two decades. These are regular gatherings of people who regularly meet informally to share and discuss their dreams with one another out of curiosity or a search for personal growth. One core tenet of his philosophy is that an individual's dreams provide an opening to experience the psyche on its own terms, and that the experience of this act lends a source of Meaning in an individual's life. This is well laid out in the middle chapter of the book, Meeting the Dream.
An unfortunate aspect of the book is that O'Connor's own bent as an academic starts to have a deleterious effect on the authority of any wisdom that the book imparts. Most of the larger themes in the book are, by O'Connor's own acknowledgement, inspired by the thinking of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and to a lesser degree Sigmund Freud. This in itself is great -- three original and widely acknowledged thinkers on the subjects of dream theory and psychology. However, instead of advancing his own ideas and observations in the context of those who came before him, O'Connor threads a narrative where every single logical step needs be supported by a citation from one of those authors or others, so much so that the book begins to ring with the style of a college freshman (or inexperienced Wikipedia contributor) performing intellectual gymnastics to ensure that every statement is buttoned up with a citation or reference to an earlier author. (For comparison I decided to read a selection from Jung, as he has his own powerful academic bent, with some pages containing more text in the footnotes than the body of the work itself. It becomes in short order abundantly clear, however, that Jung's voice is emanating from a place that is confident in his own insights, having validated those through extensive scrutiny and empirical observation, and that his citations are often of works that are complementary to his own ideas and which may not be so well known in the field.)
Recently I've started the process of culling (or Kondo-ing) books from my shelves, but decided to hold on to this one to give it an opportunity for a reread, chiefly to calibrate whether or how far my own perceptions and philosophy about dream work may have evolved in the intervening twenty years. Unfortunately I have less to recommend about the book than I would have had I written this twenty years ago.
First the good parts: O'Connor cites that his philosophy and approach is derived on experience he gained from participating in "dream circles" for two decades. These are regular gatherings of people who regularly meet informally to share and discuss their dreams with one another out of curiosity or a search for personal growth. One core tenet of his philosophy is that an individual's dreams provide an opening to experience the psyche on its own terms, and that the experience of this act lends a source of Meaning in an individual's life. This is well laid out in the middle chapter of the book, Meeting the Dream.
An unfortunate aspect of the book is that O'Connor's own bent as an academic starts to have a deleterious effect on the authority of any wisdom that the book imparts. Most of the larger themes in the book are, by O'Connor's own acknowledgement, inspired by the thinking of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and to a lesser degree Sigmund Freud. This in itself is great -- three original and widely acknowledged thinkers on the subjects of dream theory and psychology. However, instead of advancing his own ideas and observations in the context of those who came before him, O'Connor threads a narrative where every single logical step needs be supported by a citation from one of those authors or others, so much so that the book begins to ring with the style of a college freshman (or inexperienced Wikipedia contributor) performing intellectual gymnastics to ensure that every statement is buttoned up with a citation or reference to an earlier author. (For comparison I decided to read a selection from Jung, as he has his own powerful academic bent, with some pages containing more text in the footnotes than the body of the work itself. It becomes in short order abundantly clear, however, that Jung's voice is emanating from a place that is confident in his own insights, having validated those through extensive scrutiny and empirical observation, and that his citations are often of works that are complementary to his own ideas and which may not be so well known in the field.)
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review