Dreaming and the Self: New Perspectives on Subjectivity, Identity, and Emotion

• Protagonist Ripley: Represents the ego.

• Nostromo and Alien: Represent mother-figures.

• Crew Members: Reflect alternative manifestations of Ripley’s assertive self.

• Captain Dallas: Acts as a father figure.

• Ash: Represents a shadow figure with devious motives.

• ‘The Company’: Could symbolize the animus.

• Ripley’s Journey: Involves reintegrating dissociated aspects of herself to survive and overcome the alien threat.

Briefly analyze another film from Jung’s viewpoint.

Ridley Scott’s epic science fiction film Alien (1979) is the subject of this, admittedly novice, attempt to apply Jungian psychoanalytical techniques to film.  Alien opens with a broad view of the Nostromo, a space cargo freighter hauling ore back to planet Earth from deep space.  When the onboard computers register a distress call, the captain and crew are forced to wake from cryosleep to investigate.  Captain Dallas, the two female crew members Warrant Officer Lt. Ellen Ripley and Navigator Lambert, ship crewman Brett, Kane, and Parker, and Science Officer Ash, a synthetic humanoid, land on a nearby planet to ascertain the source of the signal.  Crewmember Kane is subsequently attacked by a parasitic alien.  After the crew returns to the Nostromo, the alien escapes and begins systematically hunting them.  Lt. Ripley, the film’s protagonist, is forced to adapt and survive while she tries to escape the ship as the lone survivor, finally killing the alien after jettisoning the freighter, and barely survives the whole ordeal.

As the protagonist Ripley represents, from a Jungian psychoanalytic perspective, the ego, and the captain and crewmembers dissociated parts of the heroin, who is continually challenged by these aspects of her self.  The Nostromo, its mainframe computer, aptly named Mother, and the alien itself may be said to be mother-figures – split off from the defiant and independent Warrant Officer and serving as a respite, a source of information, and the ideation of motherhood in the adolescent creature, respectively.  The other female crew member, Lambert, often crying and confused in terror before she is eaten alive by the alien midway through the film, and the crewman Brett, Kane, and Parker, each resourceful in their own way, may represent alternative manifestations of Ripley’s more assertive, actual self.  Captain Dallas may be a sterling example of the father figure, with his methodical and prescriptive approach to problem solving, and a shadow figure can be seen in the cold, calculating Ash, who’s ulterior motive to capture, preserve, and return to ‘The Company’ the intact alien creature may be a devious shard of Ripley’s dissociated pieces of the self.  She is, after all, an experienced officer and, like all of the characters, keen to please ‘The Company’ that manages the deep space mining operations.  Is ‘The Company’ an animus figure, fully realized as both Ripley’s employer and a galactic powerhouse in deep space mining?

Initially unable to control the quickly devolving situation, Lt. Ripley is forced to take command of the crew after the death of Captain Dallas.  As the alien slowly devours each remaining character, Ripley takes their equipment, assumes their hiding spaces and tactics, and eventually overcomes her tormentor in a process that resembles reintegration of these dissociated aspects of her self, reflected in the characters and ending in a wholly realized self that is aware, brave, deadly, and clever altogether.  Before the crew expires, each member is obsessed with various aspects of the mining operation, mitigating or containing the alien, or simply surviving.  With their deaths and Ripley’s continued successful efforts to foil the alien is symbolized by, and the essence of, the film’s storyline.

References

“Alien.”  2017, IMDB.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/.  Retrieved February 20, 2017.

Mageo, J. Marie. (2017). The Self in Culture. Lecture 4, “Jung and Citizen Kane.” Washington State University. Retrieved February 20, 2017.

What is a Selfscape dream according to Hollan? Relate Hollan’s idea of the self and dreams to Jung’s idea of the self and dreams.

In “Selfscape Dreams,” an essay by scholar Douglas Hollan, the author explains that “selfscape dreams involve complex, developmentally sensitive imaginal, emotional, and cognitive processes that reflect back to the dreamer how his or her current organization of self relates various parts of itself to itself, its body, and to other people and objects in the world” (Mageo 2003: 65). The most distinguishing feature of selfscape dreams is that they are not necessarily manifesting deep, repressed emotions and memories, such as the dreams one considers when thinking about Freudian analytical theory.  Instead, the selfscape dream is one “characterized by visual imagery that is not easily associated to or talked about,” and is the most common type of dream that people experience, known as the self-state dream (64).  An example cited by Hollan is the person who, in one instance, dreams of themselves in a rocketship due to an unconscious feeling of being regularly disrupted (64).  Because they are highly imaginative and reflect the dreamer’s ‘current organization’, that is, immediate, maybe even real-time situations, selfscape dreams are vivid, emotional and contrast sharply with dreams that reflect aspects of a person’s more unconscious, deep-seated self. 

As an example, Hollan turns to a patient in his work in psychoanalysis, one Steve, a technology worker who has “internalized as part of himself parental-like images who prevent his growth and development, are oblivious to his incapacitation, and from whom he cannot escape,” noting that one recurring dream, in which his car, commandeered by his parents, is wrecked when he cannot intervene (72).  This selfscape dream refers to the internalized inescapable feeling brought about by a lifetime of parental care and is manifested in a highly visual and emotional dream experience that may differ substantially from the occasional and less visceral, but deeply emotional and ‘Freudian’, dream sequence.

References

Mageo, J. M. (2003). Dreaming and the Self: New Perspectives on Subjectivity, Identity, and Emotion. Albany: State University of New York Press.