called to pay attention
Our Jungian Studies cadre was missing three members, and my billfold had been stolen from right under my nose in a place that had become sacred to us. Month by month, we had grown closer as a class, gathering to be instructed in all things Jungian. The fourth series of seminars, on Freud, brought dense readings and a new instructor, Dr. Ronald Schenk. As I waited for the police in the Jung Center lobby, I couldn’t help wondering what Dr. Schenk would make of it all. Two students absent, another missing overnight, and now a theft within minutes of the news. What meaning might he find in these curious convergences?
The police came and left, and a classmate returned with lunch for me. I wandered back into the classroom to find Dr. Schenk lunch at his desk and poring over our papers.
“Do you mind if I join you?” I asked.
“Not at all,” he replied, looking up briefly from the paper in front of him.
“I’m wondering what you make of these extraordinary events,” I ventured.
He looked up from his reading with interest. “I was thinking of addressing that after lunch. There’s something we can do about this as a group: we can treat it like a waking dream and analyze it.”
I had to smile, for this was exactly why I was at the Jung Center: to learn new ways of thinking about and experiencing life. I was eager to hear what he had to say.
a waking dream
When everyone had returned from lunch, Dr. Schenk leaned against the lectern and cleared his throat. “When extraordinary events occur,” he began, “they’re like a calling of wolves outside the window, calling us to pay attention. The whole thrust of Freud and Jung is the idea of the waking dream, of making things conscious.”
“What does our waking dream mean, then? Let us analyze the events of this weekend just as though we’d had a dream. What has happened to us? What is the meaning of our losses—things taken, people lost? Let’s talk about what actually happened. What events occurred in our waking dream. What images and symbols do we see?”
A ripple of excitement ran through the class. Aha! We caught his meaning; most of us knew enough to analyze a dream. Yet few had ever considered that waking events might themselves be a kind of dream—messages arising from the unconscious. To be sure, several traditions hold that life’s circumstances mirror hidden needs. In Pentecostal and charismatic churches, for instance, it’s not uncommon to believe that events unfold according to one’s faith, or the lack of it. In energy psychology, many hold that we may summon disaster or blessing upon ourselves through conscious or unconscious intent. But the idea of a waking dream experienced collectively—this was something new, and deeply intriguing.
Hands shot up as we began listing the elements of our waking dream. We had lost two class members, Steven and David; James had gone missing overnight, and my billfold had been stolen from the Jung Center. Four losses. The number four immediately presented itself as a symbol. Someone noted that this was also our fourth seminar—four, the number of completion. Yet three of our classmates were missing. Three is incomplete but always moves toward four. Were these events signaling our collective need to move toward wholeness and cohesion?
One classmate, a dentist, pointed out that the amount of money stolen from me was a multiple of four. “I don’t know exactly what four means in analytical psychology,” Will said, a little apologetically, “I only know what it means to a dentist.”
Dr. Schenk smiled. “And what does it mean to a dentist? Let’s work with the symbolism.”
“Four is the bicuspid,” Will explained. “It’s the fourth tooth.”
“What does it do?” Schenk asked.
“Well, it’s not a grinding tooth. It’s sort of a transitional tooth. It has some sheer, and it chews. It’s a chewing tooth, not a tearing tooth like the canines.”
“It chews.” Dr. Schenk repeated. “So we could say that through these events, we’ve received something to chew on.” We all smiled. What a good metaphor. We had indeed received something to chew on.
associating the symbols
We recognized that the weekend’s theme had been loss—some of it through theft. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud describes how a community unites against an outside threat or intruder, much as our group had drawn together when we realized a theft had occurred. We spoke about how different classmates had stepped in to help in practical ways, and about the collective relief we felt upon learning that it was an outsider, not one of our own, who had stolen from us.
Playing devil’s advocate, I reminded the class that the police officer had said even if they caught the transient man, we couldn’t prove he’d stolen my billfold. “It leaves open the possibility that one of us is, in fact, the thief, or even that I hid the billfold myself!” We all laughed at the latter, because one of the primary tenets of analytical psychology is a foundational kind-hearted but strong-minded suspicion of oneself.
We realized how quickly we had projected blame onto the symbol of the “Transient Black Man.” Though a scruffy-looking black man in an incongruously fine coat had indeed been in parts of the building where he shouldn’t have been, we had no proof that he had taken anything. What about our inner Transient Black Men? What part of each of us is dirty yet manages to wear a decent-looking—perhaps stolen—coat? What part can wave goodbye to the receptionist in a friendly way shortly after committing a theft? What civilized, socially acceptable behaviors conceal our inner thieves?
We learned that the male staff member who had helped escort the Transient Black Man out of the building had told the female staff members that he felt the man was “OK.” We discussed the interplay between our intuitive parts and the parts that operate by sense alone. Which aspects of ourselves could be fooled by a friendly smile or a fine overcoat, while underlying grime or shifting eyes went unnoticed? Which parts suspect the Transient Black Man because of his race, or because he is unshaven or has dirt under his fingernails?
The Houston police officer had given me a small slip of paper titled “Theft Report,” developed in cooperation with the TSA so that travelers stranded in Houston due to theft could still board their flights home. Most of us deplored this in a casual “what’s the world coming to?” sort of way. Dr. Schenk, however, reminded us that Freud would likely see such adaptive measures as evidence of civilization itself—our ingenuity in creating systems to help and protect one another.
We examined the symbols of Houston and the Jung Center. Houston was vast, dangerous, faceless; the Jung Center, by contrast, was intimate, safe, personal—a sanctuary. Yet the shadow side of safety is the question, safe from what? Are we safe from dirt, homelessness, hunger, desire, aggression? To every light there is a corresponding shadow. “There’s a real shadow in the Jung Center,” Dr. Schenk observed, “in its programs and their disconnection from the world, as if one could truly make something ‘safe.’”
Beyond the Jung Center lay the city of Houston: a sprawling port city, cosmopolitan, home to many nationalities, races, and walks of life. Following Katrina, Houston welcomed a large influx of refugees, and crime increased as a result of displacement. Providing victims of crime a special privilege—the ability to fly out of Houston after being robbed—is, Dr. Schenk noted, “part of the soul of the city’s stance toward refugees.” We began to see that helping others always carries risk, whether one speaks of a city or an individual. One must “count the cost,” as Jesus said.
connections
Finally, we returned to the fours of our shared waking dream—the fours and the losses. Four signifies wholeness, yet we had not yet achieved cohesion as a group, even as we grew closer in isolated pockets or in twos and threes. A classmate spoke of his longing for connection with others, of how slowly our relationships seemed to progress. One of the therapists observed that we had all spoken from our heads—about what we thought had happened—but not from our hearts. We had not begun to say, “I feel, I felt,” or to relate our personal histories to loss, theft, absence, or the things we value going missing.
I realized she was right. I had made personal connections to the symbols of our waking dream, but I had said nothing to the class. Those connections were too intimate, too close to home. I knew that if I spoke of my deepest feelings, I would break down and cry—and at that moment, I felt I could not afford to cry. We still had Freud to finish; it would have seemed impossibly narcissistic to speak of my own life while we had all made considerable sacrifices to be there to learn. Yet the very fact that I held back—that we all held back—was part of what prevented us from forming a cohesive, conscious group identity.
As we returned to our discussion of Freud, I resolved that I would take time later to analyze my place in our communal waking dream. In the hour and a half of my flight home—assuming the TSA would let me board—I would try to take personal responsibility for my own image.
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