The document discusses human incompleteness and how dreams reveal humanity's fantasy of completeness. It argues that we act as co-creators of shared reality through a continuity between waking and dreaming states. Boundaries are important for generating order from chaos and allowing individuation while still belonging. Dreams show a desire to cancel differences and be a "whole of all parts." Recognizing our incompleteness and participating in interpretive processes can help realign our perspectives.

1. water
dreams
Dreaming
music
the
Human
Incompleteness
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

2. in this presentation I will propose some
thoughts and suggestions on the subject of
human incompleteness and its opposite,
the fantasy of completeness
our dreams reveal this fantasy in a quite
effective way and may help us to make
important shifts in our existential position
and social behavior in order to recognize
our incompleteness and live aligned with it
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

3. the hypothesis underlying this claim is that
we act as co – creators of the shared
reality in a frame of
continuity
between our waking and dreaming state
between our perceptions and actions
between the world of dreams and the
“world of material actions”
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

4. one of the basic issue in understanding the
nature both of continuity and co –creation it
is the nature of
boundaries
and how they are generated
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

5. XX X
the “SEX SALAD” dream
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

6. a woman in her 50s had the following dream
“my husband and I go to a party at dear friends’ home
we decided that everybody would bring something to
eat
I choose to prepare a salad of exterior genital parts
everybody contributes: penis, testicles, labia and also
nipples and breasts are cut and chopped in a big bowl
at last, to improve the taste, I add some oil and parsley”
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

7. the dreamer is settled with her marriage and sexual life
but she is facing other family issues, due to the bad
health conditions of parents and other relatives
since years she is striving to defend the boundaries of her
own family without going into an open conflict with other
relatives and without neglecting the needs of the elders
in the last years she got very stressed; the quality of her
own life has been reduced and the physician has
prescribed antidepressant to her
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

8. discussing the dream many interesting elements emerge:
in the dream the woman shows a shadowy “witchy” side
of herself (in waking life she is usually considered resolute,
but sweet and helpful)
with her deeds in the dream she cancels all differences
and destroys the family’s structure
she reveals not only anger and desires of revenge, but
also the desire of getting a new youth and sharing a
magic power with her husband and dear friends
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

9. the dream shows what a fantasy of completeness can be:
actually, the dreamer does not features herself as “a part
of” larger human systems, because considering oneself as
“a part of” would imply that:
nobody can stand simply thanks to him/herself
everybody exists as a self-conscious manifestation of a
wholeness
appropriate and variable boundaries ensure the balance
between individuation and belongings
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

10. in the dream instead she features herself as if she was
striving for
“becoming the “whole of all parts” (F. Mina)
where all boundaries and distinctions regarding family,
couple, gender, individuals and bodily limits are cancelled
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

11. the inhabitants of the small planets in Saint –
Exupery’s “Le Petit Prince” provide effective
metaphors of the existential position related
to such a fantasy
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

12. our dreamer feels rather as if she
would be the lamplighter,
doomed to never giving up duly
lighting and shutting, and faster
and faster, a lamp whose light
nobody can appreciate …
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

13. in the same time that the dreamer had the dream and
discussed it, her attitude to family issues began to basically
change
she began to manage more effectively with her own
responsibilities and those of others
she became more self- confident and easy in asking for
help and accepting it
she changed her way to keep situations under control,
taking some emotional distance and in the meantime
standing firmly on strategic issues
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

14. a dream in a Jungian key
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

15. a dream-passionate man had this dream
“my Soul and I were talking on a balcony. As usual my Soul was
much more clever than me, and she said that I was naïf. Out of
the blue down on the street my Shadow appeared and was
chasing after me. Apparently my Soul helped me to hide from
Shadow. We went up some dangerous spiral staircase and
entered an apartment where a happy family was . Not my
family in the waking reality, but my family in that dream. I tried
to hide there but my Shadow sought me out so, since this family
could be in danger because of me, I decided to face him
directly. He had a gun and I challenged him: ok, shoot me now.
Out of a sudden I understood he would not be able to do so
anymore, he was defeated and harmless. I took his gun and
dismantled it”
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

16. the dreamer features himself in a dyad on a balcony,
together with his own charming soul, far above of the dirty
ground and crowded streets … as if they were Dante and
Beatrice … what a wonderful twosome!
in order to fulfill his fantasy of completeness the dreamer
denies that he himself works as an open system,
exchanging energy, materials and information with the
environment (i.e.: others). He tends to put himself in a
higher position, separate from multiple interaction and
exchange
the elements that would contrast this view are treated as
rubbish, which is put “out there” on somebody else's back
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

17. small surprise if what he has rejected and fought
will fight him in turn, in his dream as a jungian
shadow, and in his waking life taking the shape
of negative feelings and actual troubled
relations
in his dream he tries to solve the problem with a
further “ascending strategy”, that will fail when
he’ll finally take note that he is part of a family
in this very moment his soul disappears and his
shadow becomes innocuous …
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

18. it makes an important difference to
conceive that one’s own soul may be
devised as a family, instead of an
individual, though magic and charming
this individual can be
the relation with the soul (and,
consequently, with the collective
unconscious) it is no longer a couple
relationship, which is always tending to
symbiosis, becoming much more
organized and complex instead
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

19. the being part of a family means to be
caught up in not rescindable bonds with
relatives
family and relativity belong to the same
order of reality
not rarely, those who have a strong
affinity with the absolute (i.e.: creative
and highly spiritual persons, sportsmen
etc.), tend to have troubles in family life
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

20. reflections for further steps in theory
and practice
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

21. the taking into account a view of reality based on the
idea of continuity implies to devise human beings as
perceivers and contributors to the creation of reality
especially by their descriptions of the reality itself
this view has someway being explored by many
philosophers, scholars and scientists
in the specific field of dreams the hypothesis of
continuity and the nature of boundaries have been
probed in particular by Ernest Hartmann (2010, 2011)
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

22. in several previous works of mine I claimed that the
way humans feel, think, look at and act in relation to
each other should be approached as a whole
(perception, actions and feelings are in function
one of each other) that we can represent as
patterns and processes
these patterns of feelings, thoughts, actions and
perceptions reveal themselves as obeying
underlying orders
boundaries (which distinguish a pattern from
another one) are a concrete manifestation of
orders and feature self –similarity (boundaries tend
to have fractal nature)
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

23. just recall that order is not “something more
than chaos”, it is less instead
in mathematics, chaos does not mean
“disorder” but complexity of an infinite
degree, where our capacity of representation
fails
then, every time we “introduce” order, we
actually take something important away
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

24. with this, I’m focusing on the fact that, every
time we introduce order into the chaotic
stream of our consciousness, we operate a
reduction and a simplification that will
interact (more or less harmoniously) with
others’ reductions and simplifications
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

25. also, in the waking state we have
“something less” than in the dreaming
state (we are less aware of emotions,
secret desires, personal epistemology and
so on)
and, conversely, in the dreaming state
we have “something less” than in the
waking state (we disregard the
importance of actual deeds, boundaries
and action in “material life”)
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

26. each one of these conditions tends to
present itself as independent and
complete, meanwhile both are
incomplete and interconnected
representations of the same wholeness
the process of comparing and
connecting the two conditions may have
important effects on the life of the
dreamer
why?
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

27. provided that a complete answer to such a
question does not exist
and eventually, in the light of what I stated
above, it should be clear that a complete
interpretation of a dream can not exist
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

28. I wouldn’t exclude that part of this
effectiveness may derive straightly from
the fact that, to be performed, this
process of comparison and connection
requires participants to put themselves in
an attitude of relativity and
incompleteness in the very frame of
specific and emotionally important life
circumstances
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

29. more than the content of a particular
interpretation in itself, it is the quality of
this process of re – alignment that allows
the systems involved to enter self –healing
pathways
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

30. thank
you!
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy