Decentering Euro-centric Conceptions of Dream Analysis
Interrogating the teaching of dreams in psychotherapy. White supremacy exists in unexpected places. Including the psychoanalytic cannon.
Dreams happen involuntarily during our sleep cycle. While we can easily acknowledge that people from all cultures dream, psychotherapy training institutions tend to teach European approaches to dreams and their interpretation. Freudian dream analysis often being the starting point. As a woman of colour currently undergoing such training, I experience this as a potentially colonising process. Colonising, because, despite the existence of multiple approaches to dreams throughout cultures, each being steeped within unique systems of meaning, exposure to these is either overlooked by or simply beyond the realm of the European lens.
Tom Stoneham (2019) suggests that while Freud thought he discovered Oedipal dreams, the relative prevalence of such dream reports in the 20th century, compared to earlier times, may suggest he caused them as his theory of the oedipal complex took hold. The Oedipal complex is a theory that Freud created, informed by a cultural context, Greek mythology and the ancestry of a broad European cultural logic and history. Freud’s work built the institution of psychoanalysis, and we must acknowledge that his work (like all work) contains cultural bias, in this case, a secular European one. As such, we are required to interrogate psychoanalysis, for how it might perpetuate European systems of power and oppression.
For example, through dream analysis, a secular European lens reports patient’s dreaming of deceased people as an internal experience viewed as separate from the dreamer’s real world. In recognizing that many aspects of European culture are rooted in individualism, these dreams of unrelated deceased people strike a great contrast to non-European interpretations of dreams that pose a connection between the dreamer, a spirit world, and possibly their ancestors (Tom Stoneham, 2019). Freudian dream interpretation invalidates these cultural perspectives redefining them as the product of individual (unconscious) psychological processes.
The danger that we face in the West, is telling a single story from a Euro-centric lens which silences voices of other cultures and their knowledge systems. Although many academic institutions from the West purport themselves as impartial and objective, impartiality is unlikely, given the Euro-centricity of such institutions.
When it comes to understanding dreams, it remains important that we look to the multitude of Indigenous groups who understand dreams to have a strong influence on their lives. Many such groups are known to have felt that their dreams gave them insights and guidance for their day to day life; they also believed that their ancestral spirits would visit them during their deepest cycle of sleep. Just as psychoanalysts set up a mechanism to share and interpret dreams in the world of psychoanalysis, these indigenous peoples also have systems of dream-sharing where they tell others about their dreams in order to get help in their interpretation.
Through colonization and globalization, Europeans spread white supremacy across the globe, and this did not escape Freud’s interpretations of dreams. Freud was born in 1856, at a time when Europe’s goal was to dominate and impose European cultures on who they considered the other.
Even though Freud experienced extreme anti-Semitism and most of his family were killed in the Nazi death camps, he was part of a culture that saw non-whites as people incapable of having affect (Berry, 2017). European powers imposed their cultures, knowledge systems and practices on the rest of the globe. As this process ensued, fictitious basic truths began to swell in global consciousness. They declared: it is the Europeans who are enlightened, their outlook is valid, and that differences in the outlooks of others is only evidence of their inferiority.
While considering Freud’s branch of psychology as being a product of his European culture and Euro-centric worldview, we must also shed light upon his direct participation in the negative name-calling and acts of bigotry towards Black people. Freud shared the belief that Africans were primitive and not fully human beings (Jordan, 1974). He had, on a stand that he used for his afternoon hour, a cartoon in Fliengende Blatter showing a lion yawning while muttering, “Twelve o’clock and no negro”.
Freud used the phrase “my negro,” to jokingly refer to his African American patient, Jones. He would frequently use negative terms to describe patients or a situation. At times when Freud was experiencing challenging economic times, he had an analogy, he was depending on his patients for his living “like a lion awaiting its African/Negro prey.” ( Powell , 2020)
The transatlantic slave trade was at its peak during the years that psychoanalysis was in invented by Freud. He and others in European nations enjoyed an economic boom fuelled by human trafficking. Born into a world ruled by white supremacy, Freud and many others from his time found bias, prejudice, and anti-blackness as commonplace in their world and their work. And so, may have been unable to extract himself from the biases that prevented him (and all Europeans) from an objective encounter with the knowledge systems of different cultures.
Many of us may not think about the founder of psychoanalysis and Dream Theory as an anti-black racist, but we must understand him as a participant in the racism of his time. For example in 1909 the Freud–Jung lecture series at Clark University, there were 69 recorded lynchings of Black people in America, but neither of them were recorded with comments about these evil events and their effects on our population (Powell, 213).
As our country turns inwards, looking at itself and its history, I suggest we give our discipline the same courtesy. When we look at the world of psychoanalysis and its form of dream analysis, we must recognize the Euro-centric context from which it comes and the ways that can impede us from using other cultural perspectives. Historically, the dreams of those deemed as the other were rarely attended to by ethnocentric dream interpreters, and we must challenge that practice in our discipline today. (Daseta Gray, 2020)
References
Berry, D. R. (2017). The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. United States: Random House Inc.
Stoneham, T. (2019). Dreaming, Phenomenal Character, and Acquaintance. In Acquaintance: New Essays (Ed. Knowles, J. and Raleigh, T.). Oxford University Press.
Fallenbaum. R. (2018) African Americans in Psychotherapy. Routledge
Fanon, F. (1968). The Wretched Of The Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Jordan, W. D. (1974). The White Man's Burden; Historical Origins Of Racism In The United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pelham, B. A. L. (2020). Native American Dream Analysis: Iroquois. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from http://www.analysedreams.co.uk/NativeAmericanDreamAnalysisIroquois.html
Olukemi, A. (2017) Mental Health and Social Oppression: seeing the connection
Powell, D.R. (2013) Race, African Americans, and Psychoanalysis: Collective
Stolorow, R. (2007), Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: The Analytic Press.
Image by John Hain from Pixabay
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