Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940

Description

In the 1930s C. G. Jung embarked upon a bold investigation into childhood dreams as remembered by adults to better understand their significance to the lives of the dreamers. Jung presented his findings in a four-year seminar series at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Children's Dreams marks their first publication in English, and fills a critical gap in Jung's collected works. Here we witness Jung the clinician more vividly than ever before--and he is witty, impatient, sometimes authoritarian, always wise and intellectually daring, but also a teacher who, though brilliant, could be vulnerable, uncertain, and humbled by life's great mysteries. These seminars represent the most penetrating account of Jung's insights into children's dreams and the psychology of childhood. At the same time they offer the best example of group supervision by Jung, presenting his most detailed and thorough exposition of Jungian dream analysis and providing a picture of how he taught others to interpret dreams. Presented here in an inspired English translation commissioned by the Philemon Foundation, these seminars reveal Jung as an impassioned educator in dialogue with his students and developing the practice of analytical psychology. An invaluable document of perhaps the most important psychologist of the twentieth century at work, this splendid volume is the fullest representation of Jung's views on the interpretation of children's dreams, and signals a new wave in the publication of Jung's collected works as well as a renaissance in contemporary Jung studies.

Maria Meyer-Grass is a Jungian analyst in private practice. Lorenz Jung now deceased, was a grandson of C. G. Jung and a Jungian analyst in private practice. Ernst Falzeder is a historian of psychoanalysis and the editor of "The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907-1925".

"Published with the support of the Philemon Foundation, this fascinating work on children's dreams comprises texts from a four-year seminar series at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. This is the first appearance in English of these seminars, and the present volume is considered the first supplement to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung... Presented as an informal exchange in a conversational format, the book is overall more accessible than the concentrated presentation in Collected Works. This invaluable resource will delight scholars of Jung and anyone interested in his works."--J. Bailey, Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute, for Choice