Journal Entry #8
I've been thinking about my TED presentation and I was wondering what exactly my angle would be on my topic. I'll be talking about dreams from Carl Jung's point of view and what I find particularly interesting was his theory about how everyone has a shadow inside of them. This shadow isn't literally what we see when the sun is postioned just right and you see a silhouette, but it's the same concept. Everybody has something about themselves that we don't acknowledge, that we think is not socially acceptable or something we simply don't accept. We may be aware of what our shadow is or we might not. When I was thinking about this, my mind automatically flashed back to that article you had us read, Brains on Trial, and about the hidden impulses that we lock away in a little box labeled "no-nos" and store in the back of our minds. These hidden impulses aren't always that we have an unheathly thirst for death like one Mr. Charles Whitman, but there is something about ourselves that we choose not to embrace. What I'm getting at here is that maybe we can use Jung's theory on dreams to discover what our own shadow is, what our own hidden impulse might be. This could be very beneficial because your own hidden impulse may be something small, such as a fear, and it just helps you better understand yourself. But, it also could be huge, like Whitman's hidden impulse of wanting to kill, and once you know what it is, then you might be able to find treatment to quell it before it becomes a major problem.