Banishing in a dream: what does it mean?
An operation for sending something away, which assumes the problem is a presence rather than an absence.
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 diagnosis in it. The trouble is treated as something that arrived and can leave, and he would ask what the dreamer would like told to go.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the direction of the effort. Almost every other operation asks for something and this one asks for less, which makes it the least acquisitive thing in the practice.
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?
Getting rid of something unwanted appears in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among ordinary reported dream material.
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?
Banish and ban come from the same root as a public proclamation, so sending somebody away began as a matter of announcing it out loud.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
Every other operation is asking for something. This is the only one that asks for less, and it assumes the problem walked in.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A request for something to leave.
What are the genre conventions?
A door opened deliberately, at the end rather than the start.
How to subvert it
Write the banishing that brings something.
Try this
Two hundred words about treating a trouble as something that arrived.
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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