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DR Salles's paper contains fascinating and stimulating material for both the ‘practical analyst’ and the student of the archetypal themes to be discerned within the imaginative products of individuals and the cultures within which they live and upon which they depend; not, of course, that it is only within imagery that archetypes may be discerned: they also lie behind emotions, thoughts, patterns of behaviour, and a host of religio-philosophical and political ideologies—individual and collective.
Dr Salles has demonstrated for his readers the broad spectrum of archetypal and mythological material that came into his mind, by association with aspects of Mr E's dream, in a way that is impressive and informative as such. In response to his account I decided to try out, as an experiment, an approach to the dreamer and his dream without the aid of any special mythological knowledge and to see what turned up. I would rely, only for this purpose, upon a general imaginative and intuitive capacity simply to relate to the imagery and psychological processes described for us by Dr Salles.
We find, according to this approach, that we have been provided with three areas of evidence—the dreamer's personality; the analyst's countertransference; and the dream:
The dreamer has identified with the scientific, intellectual and apparently social stereotypes of his profession as a discipline that he has learned and to which he has adapted in an amenable way at the expense of his creativity or even much sense of life as real rather than artificial. It looks as if this artificiality is seriously affecting his relationships, to judge by, for instance, the action of his wife in taking a lover; though we have no information as to her conscious reasons for such an action. We are entitled to wonder, however, whether unconsciously she was thereby forcing the issue in an attempt to solve an unsatisfactory marriage relationship. Whether this was so or not,
we do know that her action seems to have