Culture and Dreaming: A Story of Co-Creation

We are haunted by “ghosts” derived from the cultural history in which we are immersed. Many of these ghosts are deeply unconscious in a psychodynamic sense—repressed, disavowed, or denied. Experiences of triangulation, via prolonged emotional exposure to a different culture, may assist in gaining awareness of the presence of these ghosts. Cultural beliefs such as the nature of reality, causality, and time are fundamental for the developing child. These beliefs develop in a child through the very earliest identifications with primary caretakers. Hence, they form the fabric of reality for the child. Loewald makes a very similar point about the development of reality sense. Evidence for the child's primary identification with the mother as subject is presented in Trigant Burrow's writing nearly a century ago, and in contemporary writing about gender development in women and in men. Further support for the very early role of culture in promoting “learning from experience” is provided by Mark Solms who demonstrates the crucial role of “precision”—that is, the ability to assess the significance of each perception. Studies of the relationship between dream reality and waking reality for an indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest show that the very fabric of reality depends upon culture. In this paper, the author discusses ghosts from his own childhood and from recent American cultural history. As a Jewish child in America, he absorbed resonances of Eastern European pogroms, Holocaust history, and ancient Jewish slavery in Egypt, commemorated in the Passover Seder. As an American boy, he grew up with the legacies of racism, the enslavement of African-Americans, and genocidal attacks on indigenous peoples. These ghosts (and others) were simultaneously displayed, hidden in plain sight, and deeply repressed in cultural artifacts such as Edward Steichen's Family of Man photographic exhibition. Discussion of that exhibition illustrates the multiple ways that culture is constitutive of conscious, preconscious, and deeply unconscious mental life. In a variety of ways, psychoanalysis both helps and hinders exploration of cultural influences. To shed light on what is culturally repressed, and to triangulate the culture one grows up in, it's helpful to live in another culture for a while. Experiences with the Achuar people in the Amazon rainforest provide a lens for examining culture, reality, and dreaming.