Exploring Symbols, Dreams and Moods

Nevertheless, in a second area, psychobiography has a more positive task: exploring the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual creativity through the symbols, dreams, affective moods, and stories that partake of the drama of a person's existence and self-interpretation. These psychic expressions, as revealed in diaries, autobiographies, letters, poems, novels, and artworks, can give the attentive and knowledgeable psychobiographer some access to the interior dimension of a person's self-development, which is always a unique historical and existential journey.

Along similar lines, psychohistory can investigate the historical relation­ship between psychological situations and technical, social, and cultural realities. In conjunction with specialized histories of religion, art, litera­ture, philosophy, politics, and social institutions, it can trace the historical flowering and wilting of those heuristic insights, those archetypical and anagogic symbols, and those myths and stories that flow together as the communal memory, inspire a vision of the future, legitimate institutions, mold the shape of art and literature, and support the love of wisdom.

If the transformation from compactness to differentiation in the history of consciousness witnesses an increasing distinction between self and oth­er and between self and community, then psychohistory has fertile ground where it can compare significant historical variations in psychological situations, in psychological problems, and in modes of psychotherapy.¹² It can consider, for instance, changing historical patterns of technological, economic, and social differentiation, of child rearing, and of cultural attitudes toward guilt and shame. Perhaps, with some philosophical modifications, the work of Jung and of his followers, such as Eric Neumann, can serve as instructive ideal-types for psychohistorians to examine the luxu­riant flora of the history of consciousness.¹³

Presumably, such studies will locate modern psychological cases in wider and different perspectives. One may question, for example, as does Peter Berger, to what degree the psychoanalytic notion of the "unconscious" is a modern phenomenon re­sulting from a bifurcation of public and private selves.¹⁴ Why have archa­ic images and symbols, once celebrated in public ritual, been apparently relegated to the dreams of isolated individuals in modern civilization?