Discussion Forum

JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Vol. 9 No. 2 2007
"New Facts about Dreams and Psychotherapy Deduced from Jung's Compensation Theory" by Altan Loker

Comment	Submitter	Date Posted
You were not there with Jung's patient, thus the alchemy between client and analyst was not transmitted to you, therefore you cannot really judge as all the material is not available to you. Even in acourt of law all sides must heard before judgement is determined. This seems like a bit of a power complex to compensate for the problem we all have with Jung and his pioneering spirit and his work. I suggest you ask the unconscious and maybe a dream will inform you. Let us all know. best wishes	Graham Horwood	30-Apr-08
In a court of law, the verdict is determined by the facts and the laws, not by any alchemy. The same thing is true concerning the interpretation of automatic human responses such as dreams and symptoms. The information that Jung and Freud supplied about the facts related to the dreams that I interpreted are sufficient to interpret those dreams correctly, if one knows the laws that dreams obey. I know those laws, and this is how I know also that the facts reported by Jung and Freud are sufficient. You think that those facts are not sufficient, because you ignore the laws of dreams. But this is not your personal fault. All modern psychologists believe that knowledge about a phenomenon can be obtained only by analyzing all information that can be obtained about that phenomenon. This is not true. A particular truth about a particular phenomenon can be discovered by knowing only the relevant facts and laws about that phenomenon, and the laws determine the facts that are relevant to the truth that is sought. For example, the orbit of a planet around the Sun and its location and velocity at any moment on its orbit are determined only by its position and velocity at any particular moment and is independent from its mass, volume, shape, and internal characteristics. Mental phenomena are more complex than physical phenomena but nevertheless knowledge about a limited amount of facts and a limited number of laws is sufficient to solve a particular psychological problem. But someone who ignores the laws cannot know which facts need to be known and how they are related to each other causally. The literature is full of volumes of case histories of mental disorders in which the authors try to make sense out of the available information and fail because they ignore the laws. Psychologists ignore the laws of automatic responses such as dreams and symptoms because they believe that scientific knowledge can be obtained only by analyzing the data obtained through experimentation and observation. This is only the experimental method, and there is also a theoretical method which created the grand theories of physics and thereby shaped many disciplines of science, the technologies, and even the civilization. But psychologists reject the theoretical method as unscientific, although this method is needed especially in psychology because mental phenomena cannot be objectively observed and cannot be freely manipulated for many reasons. Jung appears to be the psychologist who came closest to using the correct method of theoretical investigation, but it appears that he could not go far enough in that direction because he could not free himself sufficiently from Freud’s influence. At the present time, developing Jungian theory looks like the only way of getting Psychology out of the trap in which it is caught. Billions of people need the psychological help that Jungian thinking could provide if developed properly. But psychologists do not like to hear the truth, except that my article on dreams—but not the one on “optional neurotics”—has been published in JJTP. Only 67 copies of my self-published books have been sold so far through the Internet.	Altan Loker	01-May-08

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