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fantasy and dreams, and to defend the coherence of its function against
those who would judge its products by the standards of conscious rea–
soning. "This peculiar dream-work," Freud wrote, "is much farther re–
moved from the pattern of waking thought than has been supposed by
even the most decided depreciators of the psychic activity in dream–
formation. It is not so much that it is more negligent, more incorrect,
more forgetful, more incomplete than waking thought; it is something
altogether different, qualitatively, from waking thought, and cannot
therefore be compared with it."
As many students of his work were quick to realize, Freud had
legitimized by this argument the claims of imaginative expression to a
functional autonomy independent of the strictures of reason: not merely
dreams and reveries but the "higher" enterprises of art seemed about
to receive their psychological justification. That Freud himself did not
supply this justification is now a commonplace of intellectual history;
the devices of imagistic expression remain distinct in
his
view from those
of grammar and logic but only because they communicate repressed
material-psychic contents incompatible with the organization of a
mature ego. Freud's speculations concerning such devices reflect his
general conviction that the unconscious is primarily a source of archaic
impulses, of energies that have not yet been, or cannot be, fully con–
verted
to
the service of reason and civilization. Whatever value Freud
assigns the dream-work, as harmlessly releasing energies that might other–
wise imperil the ego, there can be no doubt that on his view anyone
proposing to take its products seriously is already on the way to mental
illness, has succumbed to forces destructive of his proper humanity.
The literary critic faced with this conclusion is in for a bad time.
On the one hand, he wishes to accept Freud's argument that the sym–
bols of art are the sole means whereby a complex of feelings and asso–
ciations can be communicated; on the other, he wishes to repudiate the
notion that such complexes invariably possess a compulsive, under–
ground character. The usual solution means impaling oneself on the
horns of dilemma- distinguishing, in spite of Freud, between mere re–
flexive fantasy ("uninformed imagination," as Yeats called it ) and the
highly deliberative products of the poetic activity, and thus rejecting
whatever insights psychoanalysis has to offer. Precisely here Jung con–
tends for importance as a theoretician of culture: it is his claim to have
completed the validation of the imaginative life that Freud initiated and
left in abeyance, by reformulating the psychoanalytic conception of the
unconscious, its occasions, its mechanisms, its function. Jung offers, in
other words, an account of how fantasy works in general that would
