Analysts

Dreams About Barach Obama; Dreams About Sarah Palin

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on November 28, 2010

At the 2009 International Association for the Study of Dreams conference in Chicago, author Richard Russo presented a talk on a play that the Northern California Dream Institute had presented on people’s dreams of Barack Obama.


It is my understanding that the dreams were taken primarily from the website, “I Dream of Barack: Real dreams real people have of Barack Obama.” Comments about these dreams and a link to a content analysis of the dreams can be found at a companion website.


The presentation, one of the best at the conference, captured the hopes people had about the new President, and clearly captured the projections that people had on him.


Kelly Bulkeley, one of the major researchers and commentators on dreams and politics, had this to say (in 2008) after he looked at the 100 dreams about Hillary and Barack:


The dreams also reveal the flaws and weaknesses people perceive in the two candidates. In several of the Hillary dreams the dreamer feels compelled to lie to Hillary, to hide from her the dreamer’s true feelings, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of pity. This can’t be a good sign of the trust and honesty people feel in relation to her campaign. With Barack, people’s fears revolve around his failure to live up to their expectations; in some dreams he disappoints them, leaving the dreamer feeling deflated and alone. The soaring idealization of Barack’s candidacy carries the risk of precipitous disillusionment as he attempts to make real the mystical aspirations of his supporters.


I would note that Slate Magazine(in 2008) presented an article on dreams of Sarah Palin that also gave the flavor of what people were projecting on her. (This article apparently received e-mails saying that liberals complained about the article because it was about dreams, which are apparently “frivolous.”)

Dreams as Reflective of Culture

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on November 28, 2010

One of the mistaken assumptions that many people trying to interpret their dreams make is that dreams are only reflective of their own psyches. The previous post on the Third Reich of Dreams is an example of how dreams also reflect the cultural psyche.


Jung had repetitive visions and dreams of catastrophic events and blood flowing all over Europe; in his words, he thought he was “doing a schizophrenia.” He was “relieved” when he realized they were visions of World War I, after the war broke out.


Jungian analyst Meredith Sabini and dream author Richard Russo run the Northern California Dream Institute, where the major emphasis is on how dreams are reflective of the culture.


The next post will give an example of their work.

Jungian Analysis, Bears and Sarah Palin

by Stephen Parker, Ph.D (Article Selection and Commentary) on November 23, 2010

I had a client who had spent several years in Jungian analysis before seeing me. He used to dream of bears a lot, grizzly bears. I asked what he had gotten out of the analysis. He said, “I really learned that I had a very strong negative mother complex — my mother was never there for me at all. What I learned was that I had to take of myself, be a mother to myself. I started cooking, I started taking care of myself; I finally understood that Mama wouldn’t ever be there.”


One of the things dreams can be about is self-representations that are not fully integrated into the personality — in the situation mentioned above, the client had a “mother complex” that was devouring him. When he came to better terms with it, the dreams lessened and the bears went away.


The last two posts have been about Sarah Palin, as part of an attempt to understand what the fascination with her is for so many people and what the archetypal pull is.


In Sarah Palin, “Mama Grizzlies,” Carl Jung, and the Power of Archetypes, Adrianna Huffington writes:


To really understand her appeal, we need less policy analysis and more psychology. Specifically, we need to hear from that under-appreciated political pundit Carl Jung.


It’s not Palin’s positions people respond to — it’s her use of symbols. Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That’s straight out of Jung’s “collective unconscious” — the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung’s words, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” Unlike personal experiences, these archetypes are inherited, not acquired. They are “inborn forms… of perception and apprehension,” the “deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.”


This is the realm Palin is working in — I’m sure unintentionally — and it’s why she has connected so deeply with a large segment of the public. In fact, her evocation of mama grizzlies has a particularly resonant history in the collective unconscious. According to the Jungian Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, “The bear has long fascinated mankind, partly because of its habit of hibernation, which may have served as a model of death and rebirth in human societies.”


Among other things, I would argue that it is not so much that Sarah Palin represents a Mama Grizzly, but more that she is missing important aspects of the Mama Grizzly, and that is why so is so drawn to them. Has anyone really looked closely at Sarah Palin’s mothering style? She certainly didn’t “take care” of Alaska when she was governor, and quit early.

Next post, more or less: The Shadow, Politics and the American Psyche

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