Dignity in a dream: what does it mean?
A standing a person holds regardless of circumstances, which is easiest to see when everything else has been taken away.
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 it surviving humiliation. A quality that persists precisely where it is most attacked is not dependent on treatment, and he would ask what the dreamer held that could not be removed.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that dignity is largely a matter of bearing. It shows in how a person stands and what they decline to do, so it is enacted rather than possessed.
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?
Social standing and humiliation appear in dream reports, and content analysis finds embarrassment and loss of face among the recurring emotional situations described.
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?
The word originally meant rank and office, something conferred and removable, and it moved to mean something a person has whether or not anybody grants it.
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?
It used to mean a rank somebody could take away from you. Now it means the part they cannot.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The thing left when everything removable has gone.
What are the genre conventions?
A straight back in a bad room, and nothing said.
How to subvert it
Write it lost.
Try this
Two hundred words about somebody keeping their bearing in a situation designed to remove it.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.