You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author attempts to demonstrate how art and mythology help us with the interpretation of our patient's dreams.
First she relates a Hindu legend and illustrates it using twelve art reproductions. In this legend a Brahman woman conceives a child and knows on account of fourteen dreams she has that her baby will be a Jaina saint. The God Indra, however, wishes that a woman of the Kshatriya caste should give birth to this saint and chooses a Kshatriya queen to become the saint's mother. Both women are ‘overcome by a magical sleep’ and the chief of the God's celestial infantry, a man with an antelope's head, transplants the embryo from the womb of the Brahman woman to that of a Kshatriya queen. This queen subsequently has the same fourteen dreams and her dream interpreters assure her that she will give birth to a great religious leader.
The author attempts an interpretation of the symbolism of the antelope and that of the embryo transplant (referring to Greek mythology, the Golden Bough, Jung and Confucius) and gives a detailed interpretation of the fourteen dream images, amplifying the material from eastern and western sources. She likens Indian Jainism, ‘a philosophy of individualism’, to Jung's concept of individuation. She then brings in vignettes of her clinical work and shows how she used the symbolism of the Hindu legend and the philosophy and religion of different ages and cultures for the understanding of her patient's material. She believes ‘that therapists can gain much from a strong grounding in the knowledge of art history’.
(Thanks are due to A. Barua for work on a paper by M. Marshak, on the first of two articles and a note on a previously noticed paper by R. McCully; to J. Brieger for work on a paper by A. Allenby and on the first of the two papers by M. Jacoby; and to R. Hobdell for work on A. Pontius.)