I'm reading Jung and the Post-Jungians by Andrew Samuels. When he finally gets away from theory to show how he personally works with clients, it's comically odd. For example: "D" has just entered therapy. Here's her initial dream.

D is rebuilding her home; a distant power plant with twin smokestacks is ugly, but she knows it'll power the tools for the job. She recognizes this as encouraging therapy despite warning the process may not be pretty.

If he means his "objective" interpretation is true, but it was unwise to blurt it to his client, than I have to laugh. Objectivity is to be a size queen about your man boobs? Nose-cone bras were bad enough, but smokestack bras? Seriously?

The powerplant's twin smokestacks tell me D has two dynamos--twin power sources for the renovation she wants. D's conscious and unconscious, in agreement about therapy? Or client and therapist, God and Devil, Coyote and Roadrunner, who knows? I don't. Even twin dicks make more sense--if they mean anything sexual at all, they're likely experiences with two men in D's past that weren't pretty--but are powering her will to change.

But smokestack boobs, male therapist as mom, far-fetched arbitrary interpretations... is this Post-Jungianism? Feels like good old shove-it-down-your-throat Freudianism!

Almost makes me want to Listen To Prozac.

Oh, they still limp forward--twin cripples! D, depressed, lonely but wary, not much fun in her life. And Andrew--locked in the funhouse of his theories.

SOURCE: Jung and the Post-Jungians by Andrew Samuels (1990); the final section.

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