The Dreams of Jared Loughner: “The Golden Evidence”

from Collected Works Of C G Jung,Volume 3, “The Psychogenesis Of Mental Disease”




[Tierney] also describes Loughner as being obsessed with “lucid dreaming”—that is, the idea that conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control—and says Loughner became “more interested in this world than our reality.” Tierney adds, “I saw his dream journal once. That’s the golden piece of evidence. You want to know what goes on in Jared Loughner’s mind, there’s a dream journal that will tell you everything.”

(Mother Jones, January 10, 2011)




What better place to start with a Jungian view of the Jared Loughner than to start with dreams… More than any other psychological theorist, Jung wrote extensively about dreams.
Some of the first news out in this event was this interview in Mother Jones with a friend of Jared’s: Mr. Tierney immediately mentioned the journal of dreams, “the golden evidence.”
I doubt that Mr. Tierney has a knowledge of alchemy, yet here is a reference to Jung’s major interest in his last decades. Jung recognized that alchemy was psychological process with the goal of finding the “Gold” within the personality, of transmuting the base metal of every day suffering into an eternal, shining and valuable substance.

2 Comments

  1. On another level– I’m taken by the fact that Jared chose to express his anger towards a woman politician. Jared appears to be obsessed with GG. He’d attempted to make contact with her and felt thwarted. Not that she didn’t respond but that she didn’t respond as he expected.

    Terry

  2. Good point. And Hinckley was obsessed with Jody Foster (though he shot Reagan).

    You have to wonder if there is a connection with the patriarchal society and the suppression of the feminine…. or some very negative personal experiences with the archetypal feminine that Jared had — some kind of killing of the feminine inside — which is a bit the story of the culture…..

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