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Jung and Dream Imagery
Carl Jung took psychoanalysis in a very different direction when he developed his deeply influential theory of archetypes.
Where Sigmund Freud had focused the development of techniques designed to better understand dreams, fantasies, and compulsive behaviors as a way of treating individual (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899) and collective (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930) neurosis, his one-time heir Jung began increasingly to conceive of recurring image patterns as suggestive of universal mythic archetypes.
“Unlike ordinary dreams, [a big or universal] dream is highly impressive, numinous, and its imagery frequently makes use of motifs analogous to or even identical with those of mythology. I call these structures archetypes because they function in a way similar to instinctual patterns of behaviour. Moreover, most of them can be found everywhere and at all times. They occur in the folklore of primitive races, in Greek, Egyptian, and ancient Mexican myths, as well as in the dreams, visions, and delusions of modern individuals entirely ignorant of all such traditions.
In cases of this kind, one seeks in vain for a personalistic causality which would explain their peculiar archaic form and meaning. We must rather suppose that they are something like universally existent constituents of the unconscious psyche, which form, as it were, a deeper stratum of a collective nature, in contradistinction to the personally acquired contents of the more superficial layers, or what one may call the personal unconscious. I consider these archetypal patterns to be the matrix of all mythological statements. They not only occur in highly emotional conditions but very often seem to be their cause. It would be a mistake to regard them as inherited ideas, as they are merely conditions for the forming of representations in general, just as the instincts are the dynamic conditions for various modes of behaviour. It is even probable that archetypes are the psychic expressions or manifestations of instinct.”
Archetypes
In later works, Jung went even further and argued that these archetypes themselves derive from a “collective unconscious… the ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation, is not individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to all animals, and is the true basis of the individual psyche" ("The Structure of the Psyche," 1931).
Jung’s theories were and remain much-contested, both by traditional Freudians and by those favoring more empirically based methods of study, but they provided a crucial framework for many artistic figures who came of age in the middle of the twentieth century, including such wide-ranging filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and John Boorman.
One of the most prestigious English-language publishing series in the twentieth century was called the Bollingen series in honor of the retreat Jung established just outside of Zürich, Switzerland (pictured at the top of the page).
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Boorman openly acknowledges Jung’s influence in his preparatory notes for Excalibur (1981), citing in particular the influence of his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) [1].
The Cry of Merlin
In his notes, Boorman directly quotes Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (condensing pp. 228-236 in the Vintage edition):
Finally a quote from Jung whose insights guide my interpretation of the Grail Legend:
"Do you know what I wanted to chisel into the back face of the stone? ‘Le cri de Merlin!’… the cry that still sounded from the forest after his death… His story is not yet finished and he still walks abroad… the secret of Merlin was taken up by alchemy… then continued in my psychology of the unconscious… We are far from having finished with the Middle-Ages as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the further it takes us from our roots… it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the discontents of civilization… We no longer live on what we have but on promise. The less we understand of what our forefathers taught, the less we understand ourselves."
The Arthurian and Grail Legends are many stories by may hands, loosely strung together. The two Myths are only slightly connected. In "re-inventing" it, I have attempted to draw the principal characters and stories together with a tight and satisfying dramatic structure. So that I make Arthur and the Fisher King the one person. I make Perceval the son of Lancelot and Guinevere, so that out of their love which destroys so much comes a son who redeems England.
Dream Imagery in Boorman's Films
Boorman's notes and scripts for other films, such as I Dreamt I Woke Up, are often structured around recurring imagery (which he sometimes identifies as metaphors) and encounters, as these notebook pages indicate. There are numerous examples throughout his filmography, such as the hands rising up from submersion in the three extracts from Deliverance (1972), Zardoz (1974), and Excalibur (1981).
Orson Welles and John Boorman
For Boorman, the films of Orson Welles clearly offer resonant reference points for his oneiric explorations of the complexities of human psychology and the mechanisms of cinema, as the juxtaposition of these extracts from Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) and cinema's great siren song The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947) with extracts from Boorman's Zardoz (1974) and The Heretic (1977)
