Bob Log #15: London Calling

I am sitting on the train to London Liverpool St. The trip from Colchester to London is nice; the countryside and villages breeze by for an uninterrupted forty-five minutes, and the setting sun makes it all the nicer. I am currently listening to 'Ecstasy of Gold' by Ennio Morricone from The Good The Bad and the Ugly soundtrack. No, westerns don't have much to do with the British countryside, but it's a very fitting track for the landscape I'm passing.

My first term at the University of Essex officially ended this morning, after the last visiting lecturer of the year came in to discuss dreams. This was a particularly informative seminar for me, since the man teaching it (some American from the south, oddly) made a lot of connections to neuroscience. He melded Jung's notion of dreams offering compensating feels to balance the conscious attitudes with the disputed biological notion that dreams arise in sleep when the brain is pruning wasteful connections, or basically optimizing the neuronal connections in the cerebral cortex (the 'higher' level of the brain). In other words, on one hand you have the Jungian view, that dreams act as warnings for the person to heed their ignored, unconscious self. On the other hand you have this biological view that dreams arise from a routine process of the brain eventually going through a defragmentation. If you put them together, the idea essentially is that the compensating 'story' presented in the dream (like, say, a dream where you fail a paper after months of putting off writing it) is the result of the brain stripping away clutter (that may have been encouraging the conscious imbalance, in this case the procrastination, to begin with). With this in mind, it makes me wonder that an individuating person (a person in tune with their unconscious, the supposed goal of Jungian therapy) has a more optimized brain than one who is imbalanced. The logic seems to strongly suggest this.

This to me supports a very ecological view of personality; after all, how one perceives and reacts to dreams, indeed the content of the dreams themselves, would be affected by how one digests information, which is a product of the perception and judgment of the personality type. My belief is personality is self-actualizing through action and reaction to the surrounding ecology (the environment but as importantly the other people within that environment), that the stresses of the ecology 'determine' how the hereditary material forms you. The added dream theory shows how personality is even more so actualized through the self- through the person's choice to pay attention to his or her self. It's something to be achieved, as Jung once said.

But this all fits things I've suspected and places I want to go with personality types. So I think it's things I can use down the road.

There will be time to digest this term in the days to come. For now I will only say this: my hunches scientifically and philosophically feel very good to me right now. What I mean by that is: nothing I learned this term really blew me away. More so, hunches or insights I couldn't quite articulate are now much more refined. This is exciting for me. It remains to be seen what I can do with the shit floating around in my head. I have to write it out.

London calling tonight. Stay tuned.