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Finding The Meaning

David Price
4 min readAug 26, 2024

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Katya Gridneva

Above all I felt it necessary to develop a new attitude toward my patients. I resolved for the present not to bring any theoretical premises to bear upon them, but to wait and see what they would tell of their own accord. … The result was that the patients would spontaneously report their dreams and fantasies to me, and I would merely ask, ‘What occurs to you in connection with that?’ or ‘How do you mean that, where does that come from, what do you think about it?’

The interpretations seemed to follow of their own accord from the patients’ replies and associations. I avoided all theoretical points of view and simply helped the patients to understand the dream-images by themselves, without application of rules and theories.

— Jung

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This, simply put, is the Ullman dream group process, only Ullman carries it out in discrete steps which enable ordinary people to make sense of dreams by jumping from the dream into the dreamer’s life, and then directly into the metaphors connecting the life and the dream. The dreamer is at every stage of the process always in control. She herself arrives at the meaning of the dream with the exact same leap of genius that we see at work again and again in all of Jung’s best writings.

Jung took it to the stars. Montague Ullman brought it back down to earth. Jung’s work was

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David Price
David Price

Written by David Price

I write about creativity, loving, language learning and psycho/spirituality. I’m a longtime painter and reader.

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