Freud's, Jung's and Marx's influences on the acceptability of Dreams, Visions and Things of the Beyond

There was in the 19th/20^th Century an Austrian neurologist, Sigismund Freud, who created an “explosion of interest in dreams.”¹ His idea about dreams was that they bring into consciousness some issues in the psyche that a person needs to work out. Freud was a rationalist and assumed that the unconscious thinks rationally and wishes to communicate in this way through dreams. (His thinking was much along Aristotle's idea that gods only talk to intellectual people). Much of his dream work he related to sexual desires and the pleasure principle. Freud goes on to prove that images we see in dreams are from our childhood or some source we have gazed upon whether we were conscious of it or not. All material in Freud's opinion comes out of forgotten memories or bodily sensations and according to him, all the ancient people have been primitive thinking dreams were divine messages, and did not have enough science to figure out what dreams are.²

He comes up with four different ways dreams might come about. Interestingly he says that other dream-sources of a psychic nature of dream are not known...but admits that one cannot dismiss the doubt as to ‘whether they appear without any impulsion from organic stimuli.'³ Freud's attempts might have been a good start to make people think about dreams again; however, it was not enough to bring us to that which a dream connects us to; the divine. This was because Freud did not believe in such a thing. What little Freud contributed was still laughed at for quite some time.

Other medical men who valued dreams in almost every age from Hippocrates down wrote about them, but most failed to see dreams as psychic reality instead of just a physical functioning of the brain. When Mortin Kelsey writes in her book: God, Dreams and Revelation,: “after the Freudian explosion one would think that the church would take a fresh look at its rich tradition on the subject of dreams and vision”, the author counts out the serious hang-up the church has with sexuality, something Freud spoke of so freely. Strangely enough, a clergyman, Canon Burnett Streeter in his work Reality in 1927, set out to prove that religion was scientifically acceptable and that biblical dreams were Freudianly acceptable. He thought that a normal person might become so preoccupied with religion that they may find it represented in their dreams. He even thought that this was what happened to Peter at Joppa (Acts 10). 'Peter’s dream-trance was merely his primitive way of dealing with his conflict over having to eat with Gentiles'. ⁴ Streeter not only looks down on Augustine and Origen but he also says:

                       “In the modern world the mental balance of a seer of visions is

                       suspect and, in general, not without good reason. The primitive

                       mind thinks in pictures, and in pictures it reasons and resolves,

                       but the intellectual tradition of Europe for the last four centuries has

                       trained the race in conceptual thinking.”⁵

Streeter also thought that people who had dreams or visions had a less vigorous mind than people who used reason alone. This was just one unfortunate example of how church became plagued by the need to fit into its culture, rather than bring God's gifts to the culture. The church also was much too afraid to carve out it’s own road. Throughout history, visions were often moments of supreme illumination for the most vigorous intellects and most creative wills, yet, for some reason that is almost forgotten now.⁶ A Spanish Jesuit, Pedro Meseguer expresses on the subject that “it is simply not done to look for the supernatural or direct contact with God in dreams.”⁷ Of course, that makes sense, since there was so much suspicion around dreams for such a long time, particularly in the church.

           One work has been written, however, that recognizes in dreams the striving of the individual soul to find God, in the book: Dreams: God's Forgotten Language,” by Rev. John A. Sanford. There are only few theologians who wrote in this vein.

           Shakespeare, Goethe and other writers spoke of “knowledge that human personality has deeper levels of being and a deeper purposiveness than is revealed in our conscious awareness. It appears that the greater the stature of the author and thinker, the greater his understanding and knowledge of his realm of being.”⁸

            Carl Jung's idea was that dreams are a tool to know oneself. He also said: 

                             “No one who does not know himself can know others.

                             In addition, in each of us there is another whom we do not know.

                             He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he

                             sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore

                             we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there

                             is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that

                             radically alters our attitude-the very attitude that led us

                             into the difficult situation.”⁹

Jung also states that he sees the language of dreams similar to Jesus' parables. They, like dreams touch the deepest level in man, the substance of his life. He suggested that the constraining forces of time and space do not limit the unconscious as they do the conscious mind. It seems that, while the conscious mind is limited and circumscribed, the unconscious is not constrained within the boundaries of either time or space.¹⁰

As important and inspiring as Jung's work is, it could not curb the one-sided rational trend that was thriving under  Darwin, Marx and Freud. However, it may have prevented people from disregarding dreams all together.

            Charles Darwin, Karl Marx just like Freud ( 19th and 20th century) portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry and the environment. ”¹¹

 

Since you can read about Darwin in my prior blog entry, let us move on to Karl Marx.

Karl Marx wrote, “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”¹²

According to him religion perpetuated the sense of oppression giving the person illusion as the only way out of his condition.

This thought did not stay in Europe, it traveled to other places, including to the United States and was there 

slowly infused amongst others by the philosopher and creator of Objectivism, Ayn Rand. All her writings 

speak about this materialistic happiness. Particularly in “Atlas Shrugged”, we encounter serious criticism of 

biblical values with the very Marxist intention to belittle them as illusions. In “Atlas Shrugged”, page 1011, 

her character John Galt says: 

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that your life belongs to your neighbor – between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven (God, angels) and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents (children of God) on earth.” 

This one sentence alone (and she has many of this kind) shows how little respect she has for that which 

is beyond and of knowledge that does not belong to reason alone.

I never want to claim that reason is not highly important. However, if we make reason a religion, as we seem 

to do now, we harm ourselves by disregarding other knowledge and wisdom which is essential to our

growth as human beings.

SOURCES:

1Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 181.

2 Robert Maynard Hutchins, Wallace Brockway and Adler J. Mortime, Editors, “The Major Works of Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams” in the Great Books of the Western World, (USA: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.) 145-155.

3Robert Maynard Hutchins, Wallace Brockway and Adler J. Mortime, Editors, “The Major Works of Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams” in the Great Books of the Western World, (USA: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.) 154.

4Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 181.

5Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 182.

6Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 182.

7Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 182.

8Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 193.

9Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 203.

10Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, and Revelation, (MN, Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 210.

11Http://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/darwin-marx- (accessed 5/19/13)

12Www.atheism.about.com/od/weeklyquotes/a/marx01.htm (accessed 6/10/13)