The hidden dimension of Chinese culture as seen in the dream of a Taiwanese woman

Abstract

This paper analyses the dream of a middle-aged professor in Taiwan whose marriage and life had fallen apart. “All my life,” she said, “I followed the agenda, but I didn’t get the reward.” She contemplated suicide. The dream revealed that at this time in her life her conventional Confucian agenda, corresponding to Jung's ego psychology of the first half of life, was changing into a post-conventional Taoist one, representing the enlightened trans-egoic psychology Jung, Maslow, Campbell, Wilber, and others find in lives that continues to develop. Only from the Confucian viewpoint had her life come to an impasse. According to the Taoist one she merely faced the death of her former way of being and the prospect of a remarkable new one. Viewing Chinese culture as merely Confucian misses the ontogenetic relationship between its two ancient wisdom traditions and the rich transformative potential of China's indigenous post-conventional Taoist tradition.

Keywords:

• Chinese culture
• Chinese psychology
• dreams
• Ullman experiential dream group
• Lao Tzu
• Confucius
• suicide

Acknowledgement

Dr. Shuyuan Wang obtained the Ministry of Education grants to fund the dream groups in the Department of Social Work at Taiwan's Chaoyang Institute of Technology during 2003 and 2004 and made all the necessary arrangements and preparations for these.

Montague Ullman, Markku Sivolo and Deborah Hillman read this paper in its earlier iterations and made valuable suggestions.

Notes

Notes

1. Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, Taiwan's National Chi Nan University.

2. The dreamer is fluent in English, but even most educated Taiwanese use an English much choppier than what a native speaker is accustomed to. I kept the dreamer's exact language in the dream and in her subsequent answers to questions about the dream. Later on, when the dreamer speaks at length about her life, the irregularities of expression become overwhelming. I felt an obligation to the reader in some places to edit that material into a more concise and idiomatic English, as recommended by William Zinsser in his classic guide “On Writing Well.”

3. This story, of course, is my own projection and, as such, reflects something that happened in my own life. Another person, looking at the same material, might come up with a different story. But the point is, there is something there in this material, there is a story. The dreamer, in the end, will have to be the one to arrive at the real story. The story anyone else comes up with can, at best, only be seen as an approximation.