C ONCLUSIONES DEL C APÍTULO

Jung acknowledges that dreams have a dramatic structure, as he outlined in several of his works (Jung CW 8: para. 509ff.). The sleep of the conscious ego and the

rational conscience leaves room for the autonomous complexes to come out of the unconscious in their effort to express themselves to the conscious mind. Their allusive language is both evocative and fleeting and is expressed through images.

The characters of the dream are parts of the ego itself and express its many-sided nature. All this allows for a double interpretation. According to Jung, there is the objective level – what the dream has to say about the persons and situations it is about – and the subjective level – the parts of the Self that appear and act in the dream. A kind of internal theatre of the psyche emerges.

Autonomous psychic entities that appear in dreams enter into relation with one another, interact, and transform themselves. The images that they bring out bear faithful witness to the process that is under way in the unconscious and give the conscious mind access to it through the traces the dream leaves on the memory.

Hermann Hesse paints an evocative and intense portrait of the ‘Theatre of the psyche’ in the last part of his novel Steppenwolf (Hesse 1963: 242). The protago-nist finally finds the entrance into the ‘magic theatre’, but his ticket inside will cost him his ‘brain’. In other words, he will have to give up, at least temporarily, his rational understanding. Here the mirror shatters where he had been looking for his reflection. In this way the man–wolf (conscious ego–shadow) dichotomy that he had been so familiar with is contrasted with the existence of very many pieces.

In their infinite combinations, these offer him thousands of kaleidoscopic images of himself.

Jung sees an ‘orientation to the setting’ and ‘a presentation of the characters’ at the beginning of a dream, as occurs in plays and fables (Franz 1996: 37ff.). The

‘exposition’ follows, where problems are brought up that correspond to a modi-fication of the equilibrium that existed before. This equilibrium can later turn out to show a further adjustment in the direction of reaching a new equilibrium that corresponds to a more developed order. On the level of the individual conscious-ness, the unconscious contents emerge, clear a way for themselves, come out into the light in dreams, interact, and transform themselves. In this way, they bring the conscious ego to a new way of structuring and redefining itself while going down the line of the individuative path. This is where the teleological and goal-oriented feature of the dream can be recognized. In fact, the peripeteia is followed by the lysis and the final resolution.

Thus Jungian thought accentuates the transformational meanings of dreams as expressions of their multiple meanings. It does this without letting the dreams fade in the light of a rational interpretation alone. Instead, Jungian thought leaves dreams with their own wealth of ambiguity and their endless ability to juxtapose images that keep on transforming themselves. As a patient’s history is reconstructed, dreams often refer to events, images, and meanings that can be attributed to his or her everyday life. However, they more often refer to still more dreams, feelings, and archetypal images that evoke yet other images in turn. Just as the process of amplification goes on to find space in analytical sessions, it also goes on at an unconscious level through multiple and varied associative pathways that open up new routes.

The same thing happens in psychodrama, where a group’s history may often be written out in dreams. This can express a kind of identity for the group, for the group members, and for their interactions. In psychodrama, there is a continuous interweaving of two dimensions – a ‘thinking through images’ and a ‘reflecting on images’. This happens just as in dreams and in analysis. This reflection can be interpreted as something resembling what Freud defined as the ‘secondary re-elaboration of the dream’, where a more linear and organized structure of the dream is sought, something that unifies the pieces of the dream (Freud 1994).

‘Reflecting on images’ can also correspond to interpreting them, bringing them back into everyday life and seeking to grasp their causal and teleological meanings.

After all, it may mean a rational approach. This is subtly intertwined with ‘living through the images’ and with seeking intuitions beyond the senses linked to a kind of esoteric quest. The levels of communication interweave here. A communication from unconscious to unconscious is associated with the more immediate verbal and non-verbal communication expressed through the body. Images bounce off each other, arrange themselves next to each other, and call up other images. What is created is what Hillman defines as an ‘image space’, where communication takes place through analogies and where the unconscious finds room to create its myths and make them live (Hillman 1979: 24ff.).

Just like dreams, psychodramatic play supplies a twofold potential for inter-pretation and amplification and this happens on the subjective and objective levels.

The archetypal theme that emerges finds its resonance in the group. It is what determines the evolution of the sessions by sometimes changing their tack. In this perspective, the proposed play takes on features of a dream. If dream material is being handled, the proposed play takes on the reality of a ‘dream within a dream’.

In turn, the entire ‘group session-dream’ can take the shape of a dream of the observer about the material that has been evoked, which is given to the group at the time of the final rendering of the observations. As a result, the dreamer can some-times have the feeling that she or he has been ‘expropriated’ of her dream, that she has given the group her own dreams ‘to feed on’, and that she has found her dreams transformed or even distorted. With this risk in mind, it may be important for the dreamer to recuperate her or his own subjectivity in the group as her individuative moment. This moment is something that acknowledges the different features and messages in the dream itself and in the dream in relation to the group. The play-dream is therefore a moment of interaction between the ego and the other.

In this way the dream may sometimes be experienced as a sacrificial object that is ‘immolated at the group’ and the play that follows it can be experienced as disappointing. However, the sacrifice is able to evoke archetypal images that transform themselves. The sacrifice will turn out to be fertile if it creates the poten-tial for people to follow these transformations. On the other hand, there is the fact that roles can be exchanged. This is made possible through the ‘use’ of the other in psychodramatic play. This ability to exchange gives the dreamer a way to live through the dream in every aspect as part of a whole that has a sense in itself. The dreamer can offer himself or herself to the group from time to time as

the actor-director of some scenes. At the same time, he lives through them but is also subjected to them in a perennial active and passive double role.

This is analogous to what happens in dreams, where the protagonist always has an active role but is also ‘experienced’ at the same time (according to Hillman’s vision) as a passive onlooker of his own dream images. On the other hand, he will later be an instrument in others’ scenes when he plays roles required for ‘staging needs’ and yet makes them active and alive on the basis of his own emotional resonance. This is a kind of ‘being for oneself’ that is found on the road of ‘being for the other’. As mentioned before, the psychodrama group lends out identities, costumes, roles, situations, scenarios, settings, emotions, a chorus that follows and comments on the action and – above all – mirrors.

It is possible to have access to a magic door through which ‘one goes out into another story’ – even if only for a little time – the story of another person that is also a little bit one’s own story. In exchange for this, one must be ready to lend out one’s own clothes and armour, to put on other people’s clothes and armour, to come on stage dressed summarily, and yet to sometimes be surprised to find oneself naked. It goes without saying that a person can sometimes feel a bit disoriented if he or she is travelling on a ‘bric-a-brac’ carriage (as one group member dreamed it) in a space that is sometimes very tight in the middle of second-hand clothes, used shoes, melodrama costumes, clown suits, cosmetic sets, jewellery, and flowered straw hats. With the help of the therapist and the group, the ego has this task: to recognize one’s own continuity inside these endless movements – that is, to find oneself at the centre of a transformation that involves oneself, one’s fellow group members, and the therapist.