Chicago Playbook for Chicago 3

The Depth Of Roxie’s Reveries

Since Chicago is all about Roxie’s reveries, perhaps we should look more deeply into them. Roxie’s reveries are daydreams or waking dreams, also sometimes referred to as flights of fancy. Dreams can also mean visions, fantasies, aspirations, so Roxie’s dreams also contain her ambitions, as well as allowing her to flee from reality. Depth psychology is be quite instructive here, so we will turn first to depth psychology’s roots, then consider what Freud, Jung, Hillman, and Romanyshyn have to say about dreams, phantasies, and reveries.

According to Berry (2003, cassette), depth psychology is one branch of a tree that has its roots in Romanticism. The Symbolist movement is another branch that came out of the Romantic movement, and like its predecessor the Symbolist movement was a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on cold hard facts and scientific materialistic thinking. The Symbolist view of dreams influenced depth psychology, because it championed the imagination. For the Symbolists, the imagination was the truest form of knowledge.

To the Symbolists, a dream does not represent something else, but is an alternative vision. Symbolist painting was an embodiment of an alternative reality (Wikipedia, 2005e, online). Depth psychology pays special attention to dreams and also to symptoms, which are, like dreams, a way of speaking. They are a return of the repressed, which say what one cannot or does not consciously wish to say (Garber, 1998, p. 3).

Freud’s Formulations

Freud viewed dreams as the via regia or royal road to the unconscious. Freud literally “wrote the book on dreams, ” so we will explore some of Freud's ideas about dreams first. Freud (1900/1998), in The Interpretation of Dreams, links the symptoms of the hysterics with dreams and daydreams. Specifically when talking about daydreams, or daytime phantasies as he also calls them, Freud explicates:

Phantasies or day-dreams are the immediate fore-runners of hysterical symptoms, or at least a whole number of them. Hysterical symptoms are not attached to actual memories, but to phantasies erected on the basis of their memories . . . they share a large number of their properties with night-dreams . . . like dreams, they are wish fulfillments . . . if we examine their structure, we shall perceive the way in which the wishful purpose that is at work in their production has mixed up the material of which they are built, has re-arranged it and has formed it into a new whole. They stand in much the same relation to the childhood memories from which they are derived as do some of the Baroque palaces of Rome to the ancient ruins whose pavements and columns have provided the material for more recent structures. (p. 530).

Earlier in the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900/1998) talks about hysterical subjects and how their symptoms relate to phantasies:

I need not explain to a Viennese the principle of the ‘Gschnas.’ It consists in constructing what appear to be rare and precious objects out of trivial and preferably comic and worthless materials (for instance, in making armour out of saucepans, wisps of straw and dinner rolls) – a favourite pastime at Bohemian parties here in Vienna. I had observed that this is precisely what hysterical subjects do: alongside what has really happened to them, they unconsciously build up frightful or perverse imaginary events which they construct out of the most innocent and everyday material of their existence. It is to these phantasies that their symptoms are in the first instance attached and not to their recollections of real or equally innocent. (p. 251)

As we will see when we look more closely at Roxie’s reveries and when we go through the film sequentially, this is exactly what is occurring. Roxie is making phantasies out of everyday material, which she rearranges and reforms (this sounds suspiciously like bricolage, as do Freud's just quoted descriptions of daydreams and hysterical symptoms).

Luckily for us, Freud also wrote a small article about daydreams and their connection to both play and creative writing, which will most concern us here. In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Freud (1908/1959) says that daydreams and night dreams were both phantasies, noting the wisdom of language in “giving the name day-dreams to the airy creation of phantasy.” (p. 148). His theory was that “a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream is a continuation of and a substitute for what was once the play of childhood” (p. 152). Notice again, the bricoleur-like references that Freud makes, as he first describes child’s play, and then later when he describes ancient writers and dreamers. You might also notice my bricolagical re-arranging of Freud's article:

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotions on it . . . . In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s "play" from "phantasying." The creative writer does the same thing as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously. (pp. 143-144)

Freud (1908/1959) notes that language has preserved the relationship between play and different forms of creative writing. In German, the word “spiel” means play and comedy is referred to as lustspiel while tragedy is trauerspiel—literally “pleasure play” and “mourning play.” Freud then reminds us that “we can never give anything up, but only exchange one thing for another,” and in growing up, the child “instead of playing he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams” (pp 144- 145).

Freud (1908/1959) also talks about the characteristics of phantasying, that is, that “a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one” and the motives behind “phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality,” which are mainly ambitious wishes or erotic ones (pp. 146-147). Clearly, we can see that this is the case in some of Roxie’s reveries, the penultimate example being the "Roxie" number, her ambitious wish of being a huge star.

Freud (1908/1959) also notes that daydreams change as the person’s perceptions of life change, and we can see this in Roxie’s reveries as well, depending on the circumstances they have very different flavors to them:

on the contrary they fit themselves in to the subject's shifting impressions of life, change with every change in his situation, and receive from every fresh active impression what might be called a date mark . . . linked to some current impression or provoking occasion in the present.” (p. 147)

Freud (1908/1959) distinguishes the mechanics of creative writing in writers “who seem to originate their own material,” from “ancient authors of epics and tragedies, [who] take their material readymade” (p. 149). Then Freud comments on those those ancient authors whose:

imaginative works which we have to recognize, not as original creations, but as the refashioning of ready-made and familiar material. Even here, the writer keeps a certain amount of independence, which can express itself in the choice of material and in changes in it which are often quite extensive. In so far as the material is already at hand, however, it is derived from the popular treasure-house of myths, legends and fairy tales. The sturdy constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that myths for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity. (p. 152)

Roxie’s reveries, as I have already alluded, combine and recombine elements from the day world in different and interesting ways, but at times they also contain mythic allusions, as we will see. Finally, the bricoleur qualities of the author and dreamer are discussed by R. Jackson (1981) in relation to the genre of literary fantasy, citing Freud, R. Jackson writes:

Like dreams, with which they have many similarities, literary fantasies are made up of many elements re-combined, and are inevitably determined by the range of those constitutive elements available to the author/dreamer. Freud writes, "the 'creative' imagination, indeed is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another.” Again, "In the psychic life, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing undetermined." Fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world; it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently "'new,’ absolutely ‘other’ and different.” (p. 8) ∆RC[ch4]

Jung’s Take

Dreams and fantasies were extremely important for Jung. Indeed, in Jung's confrontation with the unconscious, in the years after his break with Freud, dreams and fantasies provided Jung with extraordinary experiences and insights. In Memories Dreams and Reflections, Jung (1961/1989) devotes an entire chapter to these important events and concludes:

Today I can say that I have never lost touch with my initial experiences. All of my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images. (p. 192)

Jung saw that dreams and fantasies were not only wish-fulfillment, although this was sometimes the case, but that they served a self-regulatory function for the psyche, sometimes compensating conscious attitudes in order to bring balance to the psyche by pointing out different points of view. At other times, dreams and fantasies would maintain balance by supporting or coinciding with conscious attitude. Dreams could also have a prospective function, which could help outline solutions to conscious conflicts (Sharp, 2001, p. 76). According to Jung:

Dreams are neither deliberate nor arbitrary fabrications; they are natural phenomena which are nothing other than what they pretend to be. They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise . . . they are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand. (Jung, 1946/1981, p. 103, para. 189).

Sharp (2001) also points out that for Jung, dreams were “independent, spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious, self portraits, symbolic statements of what is going on in the psyche . . . . They are helpful comments from the unconscious on our outer life.” (p. 76). In Roxie’s reveries, we see this especially in her fantasies of stardom, where we see that all of the mirror imagery alludes to the narcissistic inflation that is occurring with Roxie. Later when her popularity is being eclipsed, Roxie flashes to a fantasy image of her name in lights dimming and going out.

Jung’s process of active imagination in part entails the ego actively participating in fantasies, and working with them using different artistic modes of expression:

All of the works of man have their origin in the creative imagination . . . . The creative activity of imagination frees man from his bondage to the “nothing but” and raises him to the status of one who plays. As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is at play.” (Jung, 1931/1985, pp. 45-46, para. 98)

During Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious, he submitted himself to the impulses of the unconscious, and began by doing whatever occurred to him, and that was playing. Jung had a childhood memory of playing with building blocks and stones and he followed that impulse and began to build with stones, in order to reconnect to that period of his life. This childhood play led to fantasies and artistic creations, the understanding of which was to become Jung's life's work. In Jung's (1961/1989) autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he devotes an entire chapter to this "confrontation with the unconscious," The story of Jung's building games can be found there. Later in that chapter, Jung explicates:

It is of course ironical that I, a psychiatrist, should at almost every step of my experiment have run into the same psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane. This is the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But it is also the matrix of a mythopoetic imagination which has vanished from our rational age. Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the unconscious. (p. 188)

Jung (1951/1990) felt that fantasies were “the natural expression of the life of the unconscious” (p. 172, para. 290), and that “fantasies are the fruit of the spirit which fall to him who pays his tribute to life” (1935/1972, p. 224, para. 369). Jung’s experience of the autonomous quality of his fantasies led eventually to his theory of the archetypes: “Philomen and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche that I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life” (Jung, 1961/1989, p. 183).

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