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

• Spellbound: J.B.'s dreams provide clues to a murder, complicated by guilt and alternate personality.

• Free Association: Helps decode dream imagery.

• Ms. B.'s Depression: Linked to conflicting selves and revealed through dreams and fantasies.

• Reconciliation: Helps Ms. B. overcome depressive moods.

How do free associations provide clues to the mystery in Spellbound? What are the manifest and latent levels of the protagonist’s dream in Spellbound? How does this dream provide clues to the mystery? How does the protagonist’s guilt get in the way of solving the mystery?

In his existential condition, the memory of the murder suppressed, protagonist J.B. in Hitchcock’s classic Spellbound recounts telling dreamscapes that constitute clues to the identity of the murderer.  The manifest content of these dreams, ‘clues’ for the analysts looking to learn more about the mystery, include imagery such as a man falling off of a roof to his death, ultimately linked back to childhood memories as well as the murder itself, the latent content.  Free association assists the analysts when they discover that in his dream, J.B. running down a street being chased by an angel represented for them that he was in Gabriel Valley, where the murder occurred.  And in another image, he was holding a wheel, or revolver, and playing a card game, representing the 21 Club, the scene of the crime.  Having sublimated his own self to assume the identity of the murdered doctor, his guilt hampered the investigation in its expression both as the alternate personality and difficult to interpret dream imagery, confounding the investigation of the analysts even further.

Why does Spiro think Ms. B is depressed and what does it have to do with culture? How do her dreams and fantasies caste light on this depression?

“In short…there is a split in Ms. B.’s self (or personality) …she attempts to resolve this conflict by wishing to believe that the ideology represents her real self, whereas the desires an ego-alien intrusion, hence not part of her self” (Mageo 2003: 172).  Ms. B., a patient of psychoanalyst Melford E. Spiro and the subject of his essay “The Anthropological Import of Blocked Access to Dream Associations,” exploring the consequences of the professional interpretation of dreams without a broad understanding of ‘internalized ideology’, is discovered, over the course of 203 sessions, to be suffering from ‘chronic depressive moods’ linked to the conflicting, split selves.  On the one hand, Ms. B. is a modern, educated woman with strong feminist convictions who rejects “submitting to the will and control of dominant males” (170).  And on the other, masochistic, and oral sexual encounters define another self of Ms. B., one in which she is in control and enjoys nevertheless.  While her role as a strong woman and American culture certainly influence the dialogue and circumstances for Ms. B., Spiro is more broadly concerned with fieldwork across a wide variety of cultures and societies. Spiro notes that it took four weekly sessions over many months to discern the internalized ideology that was at the core of Ms. B.’s depressive moods and that such in-depth and nuanced understanding of the deep psychological and sexual themes explored with Ms. B. may not always be accessible in the field, especially when language and symbolism have highly nuanced and multifaceted meanings.

In Ms. B.’s case, in any event, sporadic dreams of sexual encounters with her father and fantasies in which she was performing fellatio and being penetrated by multiple male partners were evidence for Spiro that she suffered from competing senses’ of self.  As mentioned, Ms. B. is a well-educated and successful woman, and Spiro explains that feminist ideology is bound up in her work, person, and lifeways.  Once Ms. B. can reconcile the ideas that her sexual fantasies and proclivities still leave her in control of her encounters with her partner and that her desires to submit to his requests, and even the act of fellatio itself are not a surrendering of control on her part, she is, presumably, in a better emotional state to overcome her depressive moods.

References

Mageo, Jeannette Marie. Dreaming and the Self : New Perspectives on Subjectivity, Identity, and Emotion. Albany: State U of New York, 2003. Print. SUNY Ser. in Dream Studies.