“As a rule the orientation of the unconscious is complementary or compensatory to the conscious attitude. ‘The more one-sided [the] conscious attitude is, and the further it deviates from the optimum, the greater becomes the possibility that vivid dreams with a strongly contrasting but purposive content will appear as an expression of the self-regulation of the psyche” (Jacobi, 1973, p 78, quoting from Jung, General aspects of dream psychology, p 253).
Published in Chapter:
Fostering Psychological Coherence: With ICTs
Stephen Brock Schafer (Digipen Institute of Technology, USA)
Copyright: © 2013
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-3986-7.ch002
Abstract
As we experience a paradigm shift into a media age, ICTs are altering the psychological parameters of human reality. The premise of this chapter is that the psychological dynamics of interactive images projected as Media Dreams correspond with the psychological dynamics of dream images as defined by Carl G. Jung. (Jacobi, 1973). If this is true, images in media dreams mirror patterns of energy and information in what Jung called the collective unconscious. Jung calls images archetypal representations or projections of archetypal energy patterns that are structured as metaphorical narrative. The most recent cognitive research (Lakoff, 2008) verifies that—indeed—the cognitive unconscious has the framework of metaphorical narrative and that these story patterns correlate with energy patterns in the nervous system. Jung also knew that dreams “have a purpose,” and that the purpose is “compensation” or harmonization of conscious and unconscious psyche. Jungian compensation is essentially the same thing as coherence, and recent research on coherence confirms that coherent states can be evoked with specific feedback technologies. Moreover, coherent psychological states increase emotional and perceptual stability as well as alignment among the physical, cognitive, and emotional systems. The authors’ hypothesis is that the images projected by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)—the media dreams of a population—are subject to psychological analysis in order to disclose unconscious sources of psychological stress in contextual collectives.