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The Crucial Insight of Jungian dream theory is the understanding of dream images in a true symbolic fashion, not simply reducing them through personal association to the furniture of waking life, and refraining from reducing them to the meaning of the archetypal core that can be found behind every image. It is to this central task of the analytical process that I wish to relate the epistemology of Michael Polanyi. There are several reasons for my interest:
Polanyi is one of the major theoreticians of science who, like Jung, attempts to bridge the tension between inner subjective experience and outer social and scientific forms;
Polanyi, like Jung, has relevance for the conceptualisation of religious experience, as attested by an increasing number of theological dissertations discussing his work; and
although Polanyi himself did not apply his concept of focal and tacit knowing to the imagery of dreams, he raised no objection to that possible extension of his language into the intrapsychic field of subjective experience. A fourth reason for my concern with Polanyi's work is the possibility it offers of applying Jungian dream theory in such a way that the specificity and grain of the dream image is preserved without reduction, while a form is provided for relating the structure of complexes, as revealed in dreams, to our central clinical focus of understanding the structure and fluctuations of the waking ego.
The plan of presentation is to discuss first those concepts of focal and tacit knowing that are relevant to the problem of the dream ego and the waking ego, then to apply them to certain recurrent problems of clinical interpretation.
Polanyi began his career as a physician in Hungary; later, in England, he