<<In addition to, interpretation is the next step. Keeping in mind that psychologists are the guide to dream interpretation and often make note that the individual of interest is the most suited person to interpret their own dream.>>

Modern psychologists do not acknowledge that it is psychologically or practically valuable to analyze dreams. Managed care companies would never pay for sessions of which dream interpretation is a component, and dream discussion is simply too time-inefficient. Consequently, the clinical training models adapted over the years to its fiscal milieu. Dreams were forgotten. Skills associated with dream analysis were not the skills being developed, and over the course of our evolving profession, psychologists became no more willing or able than the much-maligned "man in the street" to make sense of any given dream (or help anyone else to make sense of his or her dream).

<<Instead of going into a tangent of how dreams would still be considered evil and wrong were it not for psychologists, read Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. Both these men (and many, if not all, psychologists) integrate neurological and somatic reasoning to their interpretation. Also, there are countless cases in which dream interpretation has aided and cured hysteria.>>

Freud and Jung are dead to modern psychology. They are unfairly branded as culture-bound charlatan chauvinists by professors quoting secondary sources at best (and usually opinions of their own professors passed down in what amounts to a defamatory oral tradition in Psychology). Dreams are a lost resource, and dream analysis a forgotten art. Very simply, the attitude of modern psychologists and psych profs toward their field is this: if you can't manualize it and teach it to the masses as part of a training model, then it cannot be part of the field. If you have to be (or have the personality of) Jung to do Jungian therapy, then a manual of Jungian therapy can't be written and Jungian therapy can't be taught (because not everyone is expected to be able to teach or understand it). I have misgivings about this argument in that psych profs have not read these scholars. The scholars simply wrote too much for any modern to digest. (We don't read many books anymore, unless its textbooks. We deal in trade papers and practical exercises). And Freud and Jung were not casual bedtime reading. A load-bearing pillar in our network of shared expectations is that everything written should have a common format and be able to be read mindlessly (with minimum expenditure of energy, quite possibly by our grandmother in her sleep). Freud and Jung were not psychologists, and if they were psychologists in this era, nothing they wrote would pass the test of peer review.

Wyatt Ehrenfels
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