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Discussion Forum |
| JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN THEORY AND PRACTICE |
Vol. 9 No. 2 2007
"Response to Altan Loker's Paper" by Lionel Corbett |
| Comment |
Submitter |
Date Posted |
Corbett says that my interpretation of Dora’s dream is naďve. He thinks so for three reasons: (a) He does not understand the correct meaning of the dream, (b) he is used to “smart” misinterpretations resulting from the inability to understand the correct meanings of dreams, and (3) the feeling or idea of being smart or clever, which is the opposite of being naive, is a consequence of cheating, as explained below.
In interpersonal relations, the feeling or idea of being smart or clever is automatically produced—by the unconscious—when one secures gains by lying and cheating. The unconscious probably says, “you are cheating,” but consciousness interprets it as being smart. Honest successes cause only the idea that the right thing happened, that what should happen happened, not the idea of being smart. The same thing is true about all thought processes, because the relation between the unconscious and consciousness is very much like interpersonal relations. Gazzanita stated that the mental/cerebral organization is like social organizations.
When a person makes a mistake or fools himself or someone else, his or her unconscious warns him or her by generating the feeling of being smart, or rather the idea of cheating. I know this from my personal experience. Whenever I feel having been smart, I go back and check what I have been doing and invariably find a mistake. Freud and his followers must have felt very smart each time they “understood” that, when the unconscious said, for example, “black,” it really meant “white,” because the unconscious uses inversion as one of the tools of hiding its real thoughts. Jung, on the other hand, stated that he did not believe that the unconscious tried to deceive consciousness. When I began to interpret dreams correctly, I was surprised by finding out that smart devious thinking was not necessary to understand dreams, and that dreams really meant what they said. I recommend Corbett not to try to be smart in scientific work.
Einstein often said “what an honest person should do, or an honest scientist should think, under these conditions” and then told what he thought and did. He thus meant that he was able to think what others could not because he was more honest than them, not because he was smarter or more intelligent. In fact, he tried hard to be able to use his brain more efficiently. Jung saw farther than Freud did because he was more honest than Freud.
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Altan Loker |
09-May-08 |
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