Chapter 6: What does a Jungian analyst learn from the dreams of Socrates?

Thank you, dreammaker, daimon, ancient deity of the timeless psyche of vast unknown origins, for your guidance, patience and forbearance in these reckless and foolish speculations about Socrates, that clever and noble man, rooted like a gnarly old olive tree in the citadel of Athens, yet alienated from nature and reality, possessed by the female spirit of the ancient anima, wandering like a ghost with courageous and unending questions before he was to death sentenced by his fellow citizens and with some humility and generosity that cruel destiny accepted. Through you we seek to fully know him and his spirit of independent depthless inquiry, that we may avoid the perils of our knowledge yet prosper from the bounty of his questions and absorb that from him which will fulfill us. Come hither now, Socrates, with the wisdom of your inquiry, with the blessings of your doubts, uncertainties and perplexities. May you help us to transcend our many flaws as you did yours. Revive in us your dialogue from its deep unknown source that we may not cease in our wanderings. And protect us from that damn wild herd of stampeding pigs and from that cursed barren fig tree. Deliver us from the answers that cripple the seeds that should always be sown but never reaped from the dry, stubbly fields of human contemplation. Pros kyna, is inquiry not the spirit of our nature?

One of the most naturally creative aspects of human nature is the ability to dream. When we dream we are caught in a narrative that our psyche creates without our conscious rational participation. We are often puzzled by the dream we create. How well do we know ourselves if we don’t know how we even create our own dreams or understand our own creation. Maybe a dream is an answer do a question that we don’t know that we asked.

The Plato that Socrates fashioned in his dialogues is also a dreamer and we can ask what clues to the character of Socrates come in the dreams of Socrates and whether in the wholeness of the psyche of Socrates we can understand how original questions can be created.

Marie-Louise von Franz took a unique perspective on the mind of Socrates by doing what philosophers don’t do. Philosophers tend to analyze the rationality of Socrates, which produces a rational version of Socrates. Marie-Louise von Franz, a dedicated disciple of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, approached Socrates from a totally different angle. She analyzed his dreams.

The phenomena of dreams were well known to the ancient Greeks. From Homer to Aeschylus, the Greeks knew about dreams and recorded them in their histories, plays and poems. Likewise, Plato knew the experience of dreams and used them as both imagery and incidents in the life of Socrates, recording two dreams of Socrates, one in Crito and the other in Phaedo.

Von Franz, a psychanalyst wary of the distortions and deceptions of the human mind, nevertheless believed that Plato was “as loyal as possible” to the character of the Socrates that he “revered.” Maybe von Franz was duped by Plato or maybe she was self-deceived by an opportunity to interpret the dreams of Socrates, but von Franz’s interpretation of the dreams of Socrates is no less speculative than the scholarship about Plato and Socrates. It all comes from the same big intellectual vineyard where different pickers and harvesters spend their time over the years.

Von Franz, as a Jungian, commented that “every dream image symbolizes something psychic in the dream” and so dreams, in Jungian psychoanalysis, are used to aid an individual in finding the self-knowledge that leads to the healing of the psyche, not unlike what Socrates said that he was doing. Von Franz says that a dream is like a “dialogue” between the ego consciousness and the unconscious of an individual.

The ancient Greeks weren’t Jungian psychoanalysts and often interpreted dreams as either messages from the Gods, as Socrates did, a a pious Athenian, or as literal references to events in the natural world. Jung also saw dreams as reflections of what is happening literally or predictions of the future. But dreams were still accurate reflections of what was happening in the psyche of the individual that was beyond the awareness of the individual’s ego consciousness. Whatever interpretations of ancient Greeks had of dreams, as long as the dreams are recorded factually, the dreams can be reinterpreted as psychic events that are revealing about the person. The interpretations of dreams by the Greeks can also be analyzed as psychic events too that are revealing about the person doing the analysis – as well as the authorial me writing these passages that you are reading now. It’s all material for analysis, right? Even if Plato or Socrates misinterpret a dream, the fact remains that the dream happened and that it has some sort of meaning, however obscure. Or, as Socrates would say, do you disagree?

Some forbearance, please, for these speculations. Dreams viewed in a rational lens seem to be irrational and elusive to interpretation. But that is apparently of no relevance to the whole of the psyche that creates the dream. Dreams are a form of speculation in the psyche that creates an alternate reality and alternate events that a person experiences while asleep. Dreams are a form of thinking, maybe the closest that human beings come to full immersion in meditation undiminished by rationality and the conscious ego. A dream world is lived by a person as a felt experience and affects a person, although the dreams may not be remembered. Dreams also assert the reality of apparent irrationality of paradoxes, contradictions and inconsistencies. The rational consciousness of the ego does not control a person’s dream world, so the dreams that a person has offer an unfiltered way to understand a person, which is why dream analysis was developed in psychoanalysis.

Dreams are irrational fictions from the point of view of the rationality of the ego, but Jung and others believed that dreams, originating in the unconsciousness, have an alternate rationality that could be understood by the conscious mind with some effort, that compensate what is missing in consciousness, and offer guidance for what can be integrated into the personality to create a healthier balance in life.

Jung’s concept of the archetype, which can function and manifest itself as an inner voice and an inner guide, has similarities to the daimon of Socrates. The dreams of Socrates are part of his whole uncensored, unrestrained psyche and a pious, doubting Socrates may – or may not – avoid the dangers of a dominant ego consciousness.

The analysis of the dreams of Socrates by von Franz could help understand the autobiography of Socrates outside the tradition of conventional philosophy. The other factor to consider is the real spirituality of Socrates in the context of the spiritual beliefs of Athenians at the time of Socrates. If the words of Socrates in the dialogues of Plato can be trusted, Socrates had a strong belief in the existence of the gods and in a knowledge that the gods had that exceeded the limitations of human understanding. Dreams and spiritual beliefs are contrary to secular western rationality and so are not part of the lens of that rationality in understanding Socrates. Our understanding of Socrates could escape the limitations of secular western rationality through the dreams and spirituality of Socrates. At least, that is a possibility. Would an understanding of the potential of a Socratic mind and character increase through the autobiography of the dreams and spirituality of Socrates?

That autobiography might have a Socrates who was more spontaneous, whimsical and engaging than the character in the dialogues of Plato, but more focused and intelligent than the Socrates of Xenophon, and more spiritual and irrational and whole than the Socrates of western rationality. It would be about Socrates the foot soldier, dreamer, the worshipper, the loyal Athenian, the roguish provocative examiner of others. Without a sense of the character and context and whole mind of Socrates, his sense of inquiry may be lost and all that remains is a sterile, lifeless abstraction of inquiry. The questions and the structure of that inquiry then become impersonal and mechanical, what the abstract caricature of a human being with no life and autobiography would be. Examples of this are found in the attempts of others to write Socratic dialogues or even to write new dialogues for a Socratic character. These efforts fail because they are guided by rational abstractions about Socrates, not a whole living Socrates.

For example, Peter Kreeft, a Roman Catholic university professor,[x] published a series of books with St. Augustine’s Press where Socrates debates with Jesus, Freud, Kant, Descartes, Hume, Kierkegaard, Marx, Machiavelli and Sartre. These are a lively elenchus – the process of questioning that Socrates is famous for. The process in Kreft’s version has probing questions and answers but a sense of the authentic character of Socrates is lost in abstract arguments.

Kreeft tests himself in particular with a book-length dialogue called Socrates Meets Jesus where, despite the title of the book, Socrates debates with modern surrogates for Jesus rather than Jesus himself or even his disciple Paul. Kreeft writes the dialogue as an encounter between Socrates and students at an imaginary divinity school in Massachusetts. Jesus, like Socrates, unfortunately never wrote his autobiography either, although some bold writers have accepted the challenge and done that for him, like Norman Mailer and Nikos Kazantzakis. Kreeft makes the observation that Paul visits Athens as he spreads the word and meets the Epicurean and stoic philosophers, who trace themselves back to Socrates. The meeting is recorded briefly in the New Testament, in Acts 17: 16-23. It might have been a more interesting dialogue if Socrates and the Job of the Old Testament had debated, because Job, perhaps a contemporary of Socrates, had a strong sense of inquiry, perhaps more daring and revolutionary than Socrates. Job dares to ask the deity difficult, provocative questions. It seems significant that Job the questioner survived his challenge to the deity and was rewarded in maybe what is consequently the most unusual part of the Old Testament. Meanwhile, Kreeft speculates that Socrates, who lived hundreds of years before Jesus, found the truth of the one God or at least had that potential. Kreeft believes that Socrates has the potential to think “his way through to Christianity” before Christ was born because God created human reason, limited as it is.

THE DREAM OF ARTISTRY IN THE PHAEDO

Dreams are frequently mentioned in the dialogues, sometimes as a natural event and sometimes as an analogy. The earliest reference to dreams comes in the Apology, believed to be the first dialogue that Plato wrote. In the Apology Socrates says that dreams contain “commands” from a god, as with oracles, that Socrates has a duty to obey (33c). Near the end of the dialogue, Socrates compares death to a “dreamless” sleep and observes that a deep sleep apparently comes without dreams (40a). The references to sleep and dreams recognize in a concrete and earthy way the experience of dreams in the life of the individual. The dreams of Socrates may be connected with his daimon and with the conversation that Socrates reports in The Symposium that he had with Diotima. Von Franz analyzes two dreams of Socrates, one in the Crito, which is believed to be an early dialogue, and the other in the Phaedo, a much later dialogue which concerns the last days of Socrates in prison awaiting death and theories about the soul and immortality with a more theoretical and dogmatic Socrates than the figure of the earliest dialogues.

In the first dream that von Franz analyzes, in the Phaedo, Socrates has had a recurring dream in his life in different forms to make artistry, like music which he has interpreted in the past as a divine command to conduct philosophic discussions because for him philosophy is like music. But now in the Phaedo, Cebes has suddenly asked Socrates the impromptu question of why he starts practicing in prison the arts of writing lyrics based on the fables of Aesop and writes a hymn to Apollo, apparently behaving like a poet and musician rather than a philosopher. It is a change in his behaviour significant enough after he was in prison for others to notice. The suddenness of the question as a spontaneous interruption in the Phaedo seems autobiographic because it is not part of the main argument of the dialogue and might have been common knowledge in the time of Socrates. But it might also suit the purpose of demonstrating that Socrates is pious and that he is favoured by the gods who delay his execution probably out of respect for his piety. Execution of a pious man on charges of impiety might be seen by the gods as impious itself. That point was probably not too subtle an implication in ancient Athens.

In response to the question of his sudden burst of artistry in prison waiting for his execution, Socrates responds that he did it “to discover the meaning of certain dreams and to clear my conscience.” He is interested in his own dreams, he says, and obeys their instructions, although anyone interpreting dreams should be careful of interpreting them as literally as Socrates did. How does he “clear his conscience” by engaging in artistry? He explains that he clears his conscience by obeying the divine dream, another reference that reinforces his piety and the reason underlying his actions in Athens. If he didn’t obey the divine dream, it would be disobedience to the gods.

Von Franz’s interpretation of the dream supports the idea of an odd change from a rational focus to an artistic consciousness for which Socrates has the potential. Von Franz believes that “Socrates’ attitude was too rational, and the unconscious tried [over time] to warn him that he must turn his attention to the development of his feeling side.” Since Socrates did not understand the message of the dream to mean to seek more access to his feelings, he is “plagued by doubt” and interprets the dream “literally” to make music – or perhaps philosophy. That literal and rational attitude is probably just as true of Plato, if not more so. Von Franz believes that Socrates during his life was unwilling to “risk” himself in a “creative act.” Von Franz and the philosopher Simon Critchley see a rationality in Plato and Socrates created by distancing women and the inner emotional side of a man. But Socrates may have corrected that error somewhat by turning to artistry in prison as he contemplates his mortality. An impending death can be a strong psychic trigger.

THE DREAM IN CRITO, THE ANIMA AND ANNOYING EARTHLY WOMEN

In the other dream, in Crito, which was written earlier by Plato but is interpreted second and in greater depth by von Franz, the execution of Socrates is delayed until the return of a ship from Delos that is expected to arrive the next day. The execution is delayed by caution to honour the gods respectfully by waiting for the return of the ship from Delos to signal it is time for the execution. The delay of the execution thus seems to have a divine intention. Socrates says that a dream from which Crito woke him tells him that the ship will not arrive tomorrow.[xvii] In the dreams Socrates says that instructions come in the dream come from a “fair” and “beautiful” woman “clothed in bright raiment.”A man who dreams of an inspiring woman is in contact with his “anima,” his inner female soul, as a Jungian analyst would say.

Socrates focuses on the instructions from the woman whose form is just evidence of a divine origin, but von Franz focuses mainly on the form of the woman as an archetypal image with deeper meaning. The unconscious has an odd strategy of communicates with images that are not literal and are often confusing to consciousness. Maybe the unconscious just doesn’t care if it is hard to understand or maybe consciousness is ready for the message when it advances enough to understand the message. The woman in the dream said to Socrates that on “the third day hence to cloddy [or fruitful] Phthia shalt thou come.” Von Franz is wary that this dream itself could be “a literary fiction,” but she reasons that a genuine dream produced by the unconscious will have an “amazing” and “astounding” depth of reason that make it mysterious. The difficulty of interpretation of the dream is evidence that it is not the work of the rational ego consciousness. Rationality apparently can’t fabricate a dream. And von Franz thus trusts her reaction to the description of the dream.

The beautiful, radiant woman is the anima of Socrates come to take him to the world beyond, says von Franz.[xix] Socrates and von Franz have different interpretations of what the world beyond is. The anima in Jungian psychology is “the personification of the feminine nature in the unconscious of a man,” “the contrasexual soul image” and “the image of the feminine internalized in the male psyche.” The radiant woman is the feeling and instinctual side of Socrates erupting out of his unconscious to balance his psyche against the dominance of rational ego consciousness. The world beyond is not integrated.

Von Franz connects the radiant woman of the dream of Socrates with the female figure of the mystical prophetess Diotima in the Symposium, who is a figure of wisdom in the dialogue beyond the capacity of Socrates, a female figure to whom Socrates defers in the dialogue. The incident with Diotima refers to an initiation of Socrates into a hypothetical religious mystery, as von Franz says. Is Plato using the idea of an initiation into a religious mystery as an analogy of a mental process of elevation or as a form of religion? Von Franz doesn’t ask this question explicitly, but refers to the “Platonic eros” that ascends to “the world of ideas.” If von Franz is consistent in the comparison between the radiant woman and Diotima, then Diotima would be the anima of Socrates projected outward from his consciousness onto a woman who might or might not be the fiction of Plato.

In contrast to the anima figure of the radiant woman, the earthy wife of Socrates also appears in the Crito, in a dismissive way, like the complaints of Alcibiades about her in the Symposium. The earthly wife is no match for the heavenly woman in radiant garments in the dream, the anima for von Franz. Diotima in the Symposium may be better than a wife, since she seems to displace the wife of Socrates whom Alcibiades complains about in the Symposium after the speech of Socrates about Diotima.[xxiii] The anima in a man – literally the feminine soul – is “the personification of the feminine nature in the unconscious.”

If that sounds a bit dogmatic and fixed, the Jungian concept of the anima has some flexibility based on the particular mind and character of a man. An anima can be liberating or confining, in various degrees. Von Franz’s interpretation of the anima of Socrates in the dream is that it is a misleading idealization of his own feminine side that is overly rational and separates Socrates from his earthy, instinctual potential. The anima in men, says Von Franz, can be “the neglect of eros.” Socrates, says the female Jungian psychoanalyst, identifies with his mother, the midwife Socrates mentions, and he has homosexual tendencies. Socrates has a filial attachment to the city as an idealized maternal figure separated from the natural world. Von Franz links this interpretation with the speech of Diotima that Socrates recalls in The Symposium, just before the speech of Alcibiades, the persistent young male lover of Socrates.

Von Franz sees Socrates alienation from his wife, Xantippe, and his abysmal or “horrifying” dismissal of her in the Phaedo when she comes to visit him in prison as both appalling on a human level and evidence that the rational ego consciousness of Socrates is opposing his anima from within. But maybe Socrates deserves some credit for having a strong, healthy anima, rather than repressing it into the formation of a neurosis.

Later in her analysis, von Franz is more positive about the relationship of Socrates with his anima. It is remarkable that Plato has recorded the episode of Socrates dismissing his wife who comes to see him in prison with their young son and weeps. Why did Plato do that? Von Franz mentions a similar episode of the crude comparison of Xantippe to a flaying windmill and to geese who provide eggs being similar to his wife providing him children. For some reason, Plato recorded these aspects of Socrates uncensored which from our later vantage point seem cruel and heartless. Did Plato see nothing wrong with this attitude or was he recording the real character of Socrates, raw and unidealized? Whatever the case, von Franz concludes that the message of the radiant woman means that “a psychological course is beginning, which consciouses is incapable of altering in any way.” So what is the anima of Socrates doing in his dream? Is Socrates connecting with his anima and, if that happens, how would it affect him? Is the doubt and perplexity of Socrates a bridge to his anima and unconscious that opposes his rational ego consciousness?

The interpretation of the anima is difficult to apply to Socrates. Von Franz explains both the negative and positive aspects of the anima. The anima can be a guide in a man to integrating feeling, instinct and the unconscious, or a form of overpowering absorption in an ideal that produces imbalance in the psyche, which von Franz believes has happened to Socrates. Von Franz’s interpretation is that Socrates is “faithful” to the instructions in the dream in the Crito from the radiant woman and “personifies” Athens as a female form that should be obeyed by accepting the fate of his sentence to death. It should be noted that Athens is named after the female deity Athena born from the brain of her father Zeus. Von Franz pursues the idea of the relationship of Socrates with his anima as a mother image that is “a far too lofty ideal of the feminine principle” that leads to a captivity that prevents a man from connecting with the world.Von Franz says that, at the very end, Socrates frees himself from the mother complex by disobeying it, follows his daimon to refusing to prepare a more congenial defence for his trial, although he speaks spontaneously, and, by choosing death and dying at the last moment “reaches reality,” an interpretation that is somewhat convoluted. Von Franz says that an anima possession and mother complex is often accompanied by a father complex. The further evidence for von Franz is a tale from Plutarch of the strict but indulgent stonemason father of Socrates who let his son do as a child what he and the gods wanted, hence the daimon guide of Socrates. This interpretation would lead to interesting speculation about the daimon or divine inner voice that instructs Socrates.

One peculiarity of the dream in the Crito is the precision with which it predicts the future, that the delay in the execution will end in three days. It sounds like supernatural knowledge. Wouldn’t only a divine messenger be that precise about the future? Is Plato reporting the dream faithfully or is this a detail that Plato inserted to give Socrates supernatural status since Plato knew when the delay would end? In any event, this detail suggests a divine connection to Socrates through his dreams that Socrates would accept. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the truth of the dream is confirmed in how it fits the other psychological circumstances. Socrates remains “faithful” to the divine message of the dream, says Von Franz, rather than the “rational” choice of escaping from prison and the death sentence. But it is the nature of a rational explanation that everything fits rationally, without doubt? Von Franz sounds convinced. She would make a great anima herself.

VON FRANZ’S CONCLUSION

Von Franz concludes her analysis of Socrates and his dreams by essentially crediting Socrates with making significant progress in the development of his psyche and individuation process. Von Franz makes no mention of the long trances of Socrates, which Alcibiades describes in the Symposium, so von Franz may have seen no connection between the trances and unusual psychic activity. In her analysis, Von Franz says that Socrates does not inflate his ego as though he is a god and that he has admirable “restraint” against the unconscious. By contrast, do those who Socrates examines in a dialogue fall into that psychic trap that Socrates is avoiding? “Socrates,” says von Franz, “had somehow more individuality than a Pythagoras or an Empedocles and thus his fate can be considered as an example of a certain stage in the process of individuation.” More individuality must be better than less individuality. In Jungian psychology, individuation is the psychic process of becoming the type of whole individual that one specifically is by one’s nature, by knowing oneself accurately without the deceptions of the ego consciousness. This involves integration of the conscious and unconscious without a distorting domination of either. Socrates is doing that to a point advanced for his time.

Von Franz’s remarkable psychoanalysis of Socrates gives more questions to pursue later.

Does the rationality of an analysis by psychoanalyst like von Franz reveal the apparent irrationality of the human psyche or does it merely substitute one rationality for another?

And how does a better understanding of the character and psyche of Socrates, his autobiography, illuminates the creative process of his inquiry?

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A vision of the radiant woman in the dream of Socrates. Original idea by Shawn Thompson