The Great Italian Filmmaker Fellini Was an Ardent Jungian

Are you interested in dreams? Are you tantalized by the notion that dreamwork can enhance your creativity, as well as your well-being? In our busy, high-tech culture, few people devote adequate time to this intriguing topic. But these wintry months offer a good time to venture inward; as Maslow's biographer, I can assure you that he was avidly interested in dreams as a vital source of growth and health.

Although Maslow never wrote specifically about dreams related to peak experiences or self-actualization, he shared Sigmund Freud's viewpoint that dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious." In Maslow's posthumously published book Personality and Growth (presenting the annotated transcript of his entire existential personality course in 1963), he repeatedly advised his students to closely attend to their dreams. Reflecting Maslow's refusal to become anybody's "disciple," he emphasized that Adlerian, Freudian, Jungian, and humanistic-existential approaches to dream analysis all had their particular insights.

"If you are interested in self-knowledge," Maslow told his class, "then dreams are one of the major paths to self-knowledge that you have available...I urge you very strongly to hang on to your dreams whenever you can: any dream, any snatch (or) piece of a dream...and try to make something out of it. Try to free associate." Serving as an exemplar for this outlook, Maslow then shared one of his recent anxiety dreams in detail—about surviving a murderous train accident—and while relating it, suddenly saw its meaning, to his utter delight.

Impressed with Jungian psychology, Maslow would undoubtedly have been fascinated to know that precisely during this course, the famed Italian filmmaker Frederico Fellini was undergoing therapy with his country's leading practitioner of Jung's ideas and techniques. Struggling to find his artistic "voice," Fellini had fallen into midlife despair while directing the movie 8-and-a-half in 1960 and followed a friend's advice to see German psychoanalyst and pediatrician Ernst Bernhard, whose office was conveniently close to Fellini's home in Rome.

A Berlin-born Jewish psychiatrist who had fled Nazi Germany for Italy in 1936, Bernhard had been trained by Jung in Zurich. Bernhard had developed a reputation for integrating spirituality with emotional issues—and was deeply interested in Daoism and the I Ching, as well as early Hasidic thought. He especially valued dreamwork for inner growth. Today his work is gaining new recognition.

Since childhood, Fellini had been keenly interested in dreams as a rich source of imagination, and their bond was immediately intense. He readily agreed to keep a dream journal, involving both writing and illustrating his dreams. He readily did so, using various colored felt tips, as Bernhard helped him to identify archetypal images and themes offering inspiring direction in life.

It may seem surprising that Fellini was asked to draw rather than merely write his dreams for self-understanding. However, Bernhard surely knew that the celebrated director had initially been a cartoonist-story writer for a popular Italian magazine before embarking on films. Indeed, Fellini had loved to draw since childhood and began each new film idea with pastels and pencils. Of course, Jung himself was a talented artist who helped overcome his own inner crisis by illustrating as well as writing his dreams and meditative visions in The Red Book, published posthumously in 2009.

As Fellini's biographers agree, his guided dreamwork helped to resolve his midlife crisis successfully and also unleashed his tremendous creativity in films like Amarcord. Their sessions, which left Fellini with enduring enthusiasm for Jungian psychology, ended only with Bernhard's death in 1965. Fellini's vivid, colorful dream journal, called simply Il Libro dei Sogni ("The Dream Book") was published posthumously to wide acclaim in 2008.

Late in life, Fellini recalled to writer Charlotte Chandler, "Dr. Ernst Bernhard helped open the world of Jung to me. He encouraged keeping records of my dreams and dreamlike occurrences." As a result of this guidance, Fellini reminisced, “(My) discovery of Jung helped me to be bolder in my trust of fantasy over realism…Jung confirmed...what I had always felt, that being in touch with your imagination was a gift to be nurtured...He saw dreams as archetypal images which were the result of the common experiences of (humanity). Jung dealt with the coincidences, the omens, which I felt I had always been important in my life.”

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You don’t have to be a world-famous filmmaker like Fellini or a pioneering psychologist like Maslow to benefit from dream journaling. The best practice is to keep a notebook and pen beside your bed at night, and as soon as you awaken, write down your dream in as much detail as you can. Be sure to note how you felt during the dream—happy, absorbed, relaxed, or anxious. Following Fellini's lead, sketch or paint your dream, in addition to writing it. Though you may initially find dream recall to be elusive, scientific research consistently shows that it'll improve as you make a daily effort to bring your dreams into the light of day.