Author:
John Beebe
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Abstract

Jung’s phrase “die Wirklichkeit der Seele,” usually translated as “the reality of the psyche,” literally means “the reality of the soul.” Caring for the soul was central to Jung’s work. The reality of the soul is not equivalent to what Freud called “psychic reality,” which refers to whatever the psyche is grappling with in a given time. We may think of dreams as messages from the soul, but in what sense are these messages “real”? Working with a patient’s dream in which men kill and butcher an elephant, this paper explores how a dream can move us to engage more fully with reality—in the case of this dream, helping us to see, among other things, how racism has disabled the feeling function. Aristotle’s doctrine of the Four Causes is applied to try to answer the questions, “Why has the dream come? In what way is it illuminating reality?” According to Aristotle, the four causes—Material Cause, Efficient Cause, Formal Cause, and Final Cause—are needed to provide a full explanation for how reality is transformed. In an exchange with audience members, we find the Stoic idea of “the hidden sympathy of all things” is linked to unus mundus to show how messages from the soul connect us to a reality that is much larger than the individual.

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