Stubbornness in a dream: what does it mean?
Refusing to change position, which is called determination when it turns out well and this when it does not.
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 naming depending on the outcome. One behaviour with two names assigned retrospectively is being judged by results rather than by anything in it, and he would ask what the dreamer was called.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is only visible under pressure. Nobody is described as stubborn until somebody wants them to move, so the quality is produced by the situation as much as by the person.
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 conflict and disagreement appear in dream reports, and content analysis finds interpersonal friction among the recurring situations described in dream narratives.
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?
A mule is the standing figure for it and is generally not being stubborn at all, since the animal stops when it judges something unsafe and will move once the load or the ground changes.
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?
A mule that stops has usually decided something is unsafe. It moves once the load changes, which is not stubbornness at all.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Named by the outcome rather than by anything in it.
What are the genre conventions?
Somebody not moving, and a room that has run out of arguments.
How to subvert it
Write them being right.
Try this
Two hundred words about a quality that only gets its name once somebody wants you to do something else.
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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