Xiii. the Ego and the Dream [* I. the Dream Theories of Depth Psychology

From Kant comes the statement: " The crazy person is a dreamer in the waking state. " Schopenhauer formulated the same thought thus: The dream is a short insanity, insanity is a long dream. The mad and the dreamer are indeed neighbors in the land of otherworldliness. Both have the courage to risk the trip beyond the boundaries of natural reality. The dreamer returns from this daring trip sometimes happy and sometimes anxious, but always comes back. This does not succeed for the mad necessarily. He remains quite often the lifelong occupant of the other world country. The two mental conditions are also ego psychologically related. The dream-like the delusion-is in our viewpoint an attempt to satisfy the constantly unsatisfied participation drive beyond the limits of reality-at least for one night. Our ego psychological definition of the dream is: The dream is an internal autogenous participation attempt of the lonely soul to become one with itself. We judge the end goal in each dream therein that constantly the divided and even-halved personality of the awake state in the nighttime in dreams meets its repressed parts, the latent and suppressed figures of an ancestor, the hidden archetypes of its collective genetic makeup and can for a short while be related to them and be reconciled as one and the same. We call this being one with oneself autogenous* participation. [*autogenous = self-generating: produced independently of external influence or aid] Each dream is a nightly attempt of an autogenous participation, that is being one with oneself and the being the same with the latent personality half that is not lived when being awake. We call this latent personality half that is repressed into the background when being awake the background [Hintergänger]. The dream is thus a nightly encounter and a participative union of the awake foreground [Vordergänger] with 460 XIII. The Ego and the Dream its hidden background [Hintergänger]. In order to be able to insert this autogenous participation and integration theory of the dream into the succession of dream theories, we must briefly refer here to the modern dream theories of depth psychology. In Table 27 we represent dream and worldview movements in depth psychology schematically. Theory of wish fulfillment Theory of auto-symbolic representation Theory of a) material and b) functional Symbolism Theory of Compensation Theory of participation and integration of the complementary drive and ego fates Causal energetic; retrospective; objective …