Contents
Every month, Jungian analyst Stanislav Raevsky deciphers the pictures you saw in your dreams.
Love, 36 years old
“Everyone in the hall is dressed, no one pays attention to my nakedness. I keep reading the report and I think: they might notice that something is wrong. What will I do then?
Interpretation
“If you turn this plot inside out, you get a well-known psychological device that relieves embarrassment during a public speech. The speaker is asked to imagine that the audience in the hall has lost their clothes, but so far they do not notice this and continue to sit naked with serious faces. Speaking in front of such an audience, most likely, will not cause embarrassment.
The fear of being naked in public is very common, as are dreams on this topic. But why are we ashamed of our nakedness? This question brings us back to the biblical story of the expulsion from paradise: Adam and Eve violated the ban on eating fruits from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, after which they were ashamed of their nakedness. Consider the connection between shame and knowledge.
However, today we are much less ashamed of our bodily nakedness. This is the result of the sexual revolution initiated by Sigmund Freud, who showed that the cause of many neuroses lies in the repression of sexuality. Shame causes us to hide our sexual impulses and desires from others and even from ourselves. And sometimes we are so successful in this that we continue to be ashamed, having already forgotten what caused our shame in the first place. The method of treatment proposed by Freud is paradoxical: undergoing psychoanalysis, the patient is mentally exposed, removing veil after veil from his secrets. Once exposed, the secret ceases to be a secret and becomes knowledge. There is nothing more to hide, and the burden of shame disappears. Everyone who saw himself naked in a dream can ask himself questions: what am I embarrassed of? What am I embarrassed to show other people? If I tell my relatives about this, how will they react to this — will they start to shame? drive away? beat? In reality, people are often much more ready to accept us than we imagined in disturbing fantasies. Perhaps understanding the boundary between fantasy and reality will make us freer.
- What is your biorhythm?
Often we are ashamed of our weaknesses, real or imaginary, we try to hide our true essence and begin to play someone else’s role. Then the clothes become theatrical costume, which helps us to be someone who seems to us more deserving of respect than ourselves. She is like a royal outfit that makes us important and significant in the eyes of others, but not in our own. And if, as in a fairy tale, there is a boy who shouts: “But the king is naked!”, then our deceit will be exposed and we will experience burning shame. But we have real, not invented virtues, abilities and achievements. We just need to acknowledge them along with our weaknesses and mistakes. Then we will stop worrying about how others see us. We will know for sure what we are really worth, and we will not be afraid to be naked in front of the public.