Dependence in a dream: what does it mean?
Relying on somebody or something you cannot do without, which is a description of nearly everyone and an accusation when said aloud.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the shame attached. A condition that is universal and is nonetheless treated as a failing has been assigned a moral weight it does not carry, and he would ask who taught the dreamer that.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that dependence runs both ways. The person depended on is also held in place by it, and the arrangement is rarely as one-sided as either party describes.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Familiar people dominate dream casts, and content analysis finds close relationships appearing in proportion to their waking importance rather than to time spent together.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Every household arrangement before the modern period assumed mutual dependence as the ordinary state, and the idea of a self-sufficient adult is a recent and fairly local invention.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
The independent adult is a recent idea and not a widespread one. Every older arrangement assumed the opposite.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Universal and still treated as a failing.
What are the genre conventions?
Somebody who cannot manage the stairs, and somebody who has not said so.
How to subvert it
Write the depended-upon person unable to leave.
Try this
Two hundred words about a completely ordinary condition that nobody will admit to being in.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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