What I mean is a power that can be unleashed, unlocked, unburdened, unbound. What I mean is a power, too, that can be unhinged, unbalanced, unstable, binding.
Constructive [sometimes through destruction of what is not true]. Destructive [sometimes through constructing/reconstructing of what is not true].
Power that can free us. Power we can wield to bind others and ourselves.
What I mean is a power that is personal, internal, intimate. What I mean, too, is a power that is external, personal and in community.
What I mean, really, is we can let dreaming teach us or we can use the power offered by dreaming against our selves [intimately] and others [in community].
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I have been re-reading CG Jung’s work, which I read many years ago in my studies of both dreaming and creative writing. Interesting to read him now, after many years of my own work and working with others, interesting [a little heartbreaking] to read him without the [common] lens of “genius” and “he was a man of his time” and everything he did as “sacrosanct”, interesting to read him now in the context of what we [and I] know now.
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How we examine our predecessors matters, in their own contextuality. To not assume that the man Jung was/is a universal kind of man, a kind man, or that he was above his own blindspots. It is sometimes easy to forget that he was born in a time when people were still driving horse and carriages, when women were considered physically and mentally inferior. He was born to a time and a place and a class structure structured around “the other” with “white man” as the main reference point. He was born to a time of the idea of “primitive” people and “cultured” people. “Cultured” people being people of European descent, white and in upper classes. “Primitive” people were not of European descent, not of upper classes and not “educated” in the ways thought appropriate. In fact, anything that was opposite of what Jung and his class was.
The point, of course, is not to complete burn all of Jung’s work, but to bring it into context, to bring it into the truths we live now around race, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, etc.
Just as we work dreams with contextuality, so we must take dream teachers – and yes, including me – in their contextuality. What brilliance and ignorance is brought? What insight and prejudice? What is groundbreaking and what comes from their [our] blindspots?
And how has this effected us.
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