Za Robert A. Johnson
"Inner work using dreams and active imagination for personal growth"
...
Many years ago, when I was studying at the Jung Institute in Zurich, the famous Toni Wolffe (a colleague of Jung)was still working with patients there as an analyst. On this
particular subject, doing something concrete about your dream, she
was known as a holy terror. She met her patients at the door, and
before they could even get into a chair, she would demand: “And
what did you do about that dream from last week?”
Patients who had done something specific, something
concrete and physical, were safe from the wrath to come. But if
they hemmed and hawed, said they had thought about it a little, had
talked with someone about it, or some such vague thing, she would
turn them around and steer them back through the door. As the door
was slamming behind them, she would say: “Come back when you mean
business.” That was the way it was with her, and everyone knew it:
You either worked or you fled.
Toni Wolffe’s idea was that dreams exist in modern
people too much as airy thoughts, too much as abstractions in the
head. One has to notify the rest of one’s body that one has
dreamed. She said: “People can analyze for twenty years, and
nothing below the neck is aware that anything is going on! You have
to do something about it. Do something with your muscles!”
Our tendency in the West is to make everything
abstract, to use wordy discussion as a substitute for direct
feeling experience. We have a tremendous need to get our bodies and
our feelings involved. We have to transform our theoretical ideas
into “gut-level” experience. Ideas and images from your dream
should enter into your emotions, your muscle fibers, the cells of
your body. It takes a physical act. When it registers physically,
it also registers at the deepest levels of the psyche.
...
If we look at ritual from a psychological
standpoint, we may say that correct ritual is symbolic behavior,
consciously performed. Different persons will have different
language to express what is symbolized by the ritual acts. But the
highest form of ritual has this characteristic: Those who
participate sense that they are doing an act that has symbolic
meaning, and they consciously seek to transform that act into an
active, dynamic symbol. Their every movement becomes a
symbol-in-motion that carries the power of the inner world into
visible and physical form.
