DREAMS AND THE INELUCTABLE BODY
(with a new Preface 2025)
Ineluctable: Not to be avoided or escaped. Latin: eluctari: to struggle out of; luctari to struggle. American Heritage Dictionary
PREFACE (2025)
I recently re-opened my inquiry about the relationship between psyche and body (Sep. 2025) because of some dreams I had that portrayed images of cancer. In 2023 I dreamed:
I am with a woman who tells me that she has cancer. She undoes her shirt and I see nothing wrong, clear skin, lovely body, on the surface that is. But she is telling me that the cancer is now throughout her body. I am moved to tears from the telling. Upon awakening, at first I fall into a belief response. What am I to believe — what she is showing me on the surface, or what she is telling me from the depths? But maybe a belief response is not the way to go. Maybe there is another response altogether. Perhaps it lies in my tearful response. I was moved by her telling, which was simultaneously a showing!
The “either-or” mind as given us by the tradition of Cartesian consciousness divides inner from outer, giving rise to a host of questions how we can overcome the divide. My dream prompted me to re-read an essay by Russell Lockhart, Cancer in Myth and Dream, in which he reminds us that that in the fields of analytical psychology and psychosomatic medicine much more work needs to be done here:
Is it possible to learn from the dream life of an individual whether the “woe and weal” there pictured will express itself in a somatic cancer? Are there dream themes or images premonitory of a developing cancerous condition? Do different cancers symbolize themselves differently? Are dreams prognostic? How is cancer treatment pictured in dreams? How might dreams be utilized in the treatment of a cancer patient? Is there a healing dream process in relation to cancer? Do dreams prepare the way to death? In spite of the many hints by Jung, the study of these issues relating to the dream-disease relationship has not been a prominent part of analytical psychology and certainly not a visible part of psychosomatic medicine. Analysts and patients feel on much safer ground interpreting a dream psychologically than in regarding a dream from its organic aspect, even though, as Jung pointed out, a dream with an organic implication often has a peculiar effect not only on the dreamer’s body but also on the body of the analyst.
My essay below further explores these pressing questions in terms of dreams and the ineluctable body. I wrote this essay in 2020, revised it in 2024 and, after receiving my dream above in 2023, I have been “cooking” with its mystery for two years. She seems to be showing me and simultaneously telling me that another kind of (revelatory) thinking is possible if the outer surface appearance is coupled with the inner speech of the depths, as indeed she was demonstrating to me! She is that link and she opened me up to a fresh understanding of the appearances, i.e., as concrete manifestations of the inner. Ordinary surface appearances, if coupled with speech of the depths, i.e., her revelatory speech, psyche’s speech, can open me to fresh understanding of the appearances of the world. And in our times, she is telling/showing me that the surface appearances of our world are consumed with cancer, from the inside! Lockhart offers his description of the concrete manifestations of this “inner” cancer:
Industrial cultures hurt the earth. This hurting is supported by a psychological attitude very like that of the Prince and Erysichthon. The enactment of this attitude tends to disrupt and disturb natural mechanisms and the delicate balances existing in the ecosphere. The resulting pollutions and other iatrogenic effects of these disturbances become the poisons, the carcinogens and, ultimately, the seeds of ravening hunger. The industrial culture begins to consume itself.
It seems to me that our understanding of the link between dream and ineluctable body lies within this mystery of revelatory thinking united with sensory perception. I hope now to further elucidate this hypothesis via C. G. Jung’s famous and amazing diagnosis of physical ailments based entirely on dreams….
