The Protest of the Instinct
Perhaps only the dream images still prolong in us the human-animal relationship that existed in remote times. This relationship was gradually lost in a parallel process of vital degradation, characteristic of our culture. The extinction of animal species by the rapine and vanity of human beings is only one expression of this irreparable loss of cosmobiological solidarity. Dreams with dead animals are the expression of the strangulation of instinct and the loss of vitality. Nightmares with frightening animals are the protest of our animality against the very high levels of cultural repression. The crazy outbursts of sadism and cruelty of our time represent the absolute lack of control of the instinctive forces that, in detaching themselves from our life as a whole, take on destructive forms. In contemporary literature, animals appear as an expression of nightmare. In Kafka´s The Metamorphosis, the character Gregor wakes up in the morning as a cockroach. In Ionesco's The Rhinos, bureaucrats invade the office transformed into rhinos. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appears the Wolf Man and all the expressions of “lycanthropy”. Vampires, monstrous orangutans, antediluvian beings, emerge in the tormented dreams of our time. It would seem that the most tender and noble person hides, like the murderer or the madman, a monster in the depth of his unconscious. |
In this conception, a series of myths of Gaia - Uranus - Cronus - Zeus are ordered. The representation of these bestial gods and their worship are a way of conjuring up the implicit dangers of the instinctual forces. We must put our fears outside ourselves, become familiar with them. Leonardo da Vinci expressed, “Monsters can only be controlled once they are known. And to know them we have to draw them”. Since the beast represents the energy that provides creation and destruction, it is not a matter of killing it, but of knowing it, assuming it and creatively guiding its vital energy. In the act of dancing our inner animals, we re-edit the great mythical gestures and nourish ourselves with totemic energy.
Random dream quotes
Undoubtedly, the symbolism of birds as inhabitants of the air and of boundless spaces alludes to the liberation of oppressive feelings of dependence. This symbolism was explored by Gastón Bachelard in his book Air and Dreams. *** It would seem that the contents of aggressiveness and fear that remain stored inside the person, when not manifest in dreams, would accumulate in the organs in the form of visceral tensions. |
Pre-verbal & poetic language
in approaching defensive structures
Such a statement needs to be reconsidered. Wilhelm Reich established that the defense structures have bodily concomitants and manifest as chronic muscle stiffness and visceral tension. This conception was repeatedly confirmed by “non-verbal” psychotherapies. We must recognize that the defense structures encompass several plans, which include neurovegetative, neurohormonal, motor, affective and cognitive responses. The defensive apparatus even includes the dream process, as described by Freud, through the dream censorship mechanism. The different defense mechanisms are expressed both in visceral and motor responses and in the ones of a cognitive verbal character. Evidently, then, repression permeates the totality of the individual's responses.