A collection of quotes by Medard Boss, I dreamt last night.
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Even interpretations based on depth-psychological dream theories often meet with some success; this despite the fact that their assumptions are purely speculative, while conclusions drawn from those assumptions, such as the posited relationship between latent and manifest dream contents, have no basis in fact.Experience teaches, by the way, that patients who assume a observer's stance while dreaming, distancing themselves from active participation with others, require especially stubborn, persistent therapists.Positive declarations of what something means tend to force the therapist into the role of authority figure, at the same time thrusting the patient into subordinate, infantile behavior.Both Freud's original depth-psychological dream theory and all others that have imitated it in defining dreams as attempts at self-deception inevitably end up in a series of logical impasses...Notwithstanding the immense expenditure of theoretical labor in past decades, today - three-quarters of a century later - critical opinion is increasingly eroding depth-psychological theories of dream interpretation. The most skeptical of these critics come from the ranks of the analysts themselves.Because the natural scientific approach from which all depth-psychological dream theories spring is gradually relinquishing its absolute hold on the human imagination, in the future more and more patients will refuse to pass blindly over the inconsistencies hidden in traditional dream theories. Increasingly, they will defend themselves against depth-psychological dream interpretation...The dream reinterpretations posited by depth-psychological theories are not just theoretically untenable; they also prohibit the therapist from gaining the understanding of the dreaming he needs if he is to help the patient.
Medard Boss, I dreamt last night
