A Book review of The Dreams of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (Buy the book using this link and support the good work of Mindfunda)by Benjamin Ehrlich Oxford University Press 2017 $37.95 ISBN 9780190619619 By Dutch psychologist Susanne van Doorn
SANTIAGO RAMON Y CAJAL: introduction
Do you think dreams have a deeper, psychological meaning? Or do you think dreams are the result of the brain activity at night?
The International Association for the Study of Dreams, of which I am a board member, says that a dream can not be interpreted by anyone else but the dreamer. This is a very elegant, sophisticated way to balance between the two opposite views.
What are your experiences? Do you think that dreams are random chatter? Or have you had a dream that changed your life? Let me know in the comments, I would love to hear your take on this.
SANTIAGO RAMoN Y CAJAL: THE Doctor – Artist
The nice guy in the picture is Santiago Ramon y Cajal, born in 1852. His father, Justo Ramóny, made his own way to wealth by becoming a doctor. He wanted his son to do the same. In order to teach Santiago about the human body, they went to graveyards to dig up and analyse corpses…
His father did not want to have anything to do with the romantic soul of his son. Santiago had to learn, not play.
During his life Santiago made sure he had an outlet for his creative side: he made drawings of his laboratory-findings and he was an excellent photographer, see the self portrait at the top of this article.
If you live in Minneapolis: there is an exhibition about his artwork in the Weisman Art museum until May 21, 2017.
Santiago Ramon y Cajal: the cel as hero
The book consists of two parts. the first part is composed out of 10 chapters that give the reader background information about Cajal, Spain in the beginning the 1900’s, and how Spain became Freudian – oriented.
The first part of this book convinced me that Cajal was an incurable romantic. In his eyes, the cell was a hero. He studies the nerve cell with Golgi technique. Tragically, he and his opponent Golgi had to share the Nobel Prize…
According to Santiago, the cell was a hero, in the quest for the adventure of life.
“The probing ends of growing fibers are battering rams, and the fateful meeting between two communist neurons, later termed the synapse, he likened to a protoplasmic kiss” (page 7).
1899; Instituto Cajal, Madrid, Spain.
SANTIAGO RAMoN Y CAJAL and Freud
Cajal and Freud were celebrated scholars in the 1900s. Cajal became the father of neurology, while Freud became the father of psychoanalysis.
Cajal did not agree with Freud. In 1911 Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote about “The Secret of Dreams”, and introduced Freud his ideas to Spain. Six year later, Ortega acquired the rights to publish the translated works of Freud.
Spain started warming up to Freud. Influential artist Dali was a great admirer of Freud. He visited Freud one day and made a fool of himself in his nervousness.
Freud allegedly said about Dali: “That boy looks like a fanatic. Small wonder that they have civil war in Spain if they look like that”.
Copyright Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation
Cajal writes to his friend Gregorio Marañón (1887–1960), in relation to Freud’s approach to dreams:
… I consider as collective lies both psychoanalysis and Freud’s theory of dreams; nearly all the findings of the wise Viennese scholar can be explained by individual or collective suggestion. Of this I shall speak if I manage to live long enough to write another book on dreams, in which I summarize thousands of self-observations contradicting Freud’s theory (Durán and Alonso, 1960).
The book about dreams that Cajal refers to in this quote is an article called “Los sueños” in the Revista Cajal de Medicina y Cirugía in 1908.
RAMoN Y CAJAL and dreams
Santiago Ramon y Cajal considered Freud’s way of exploring the brain as unscientific. In his mind, dreams are random chit-chat of brain waves.
In our day and age, exactly the same intellectual battle is going on between Alan Hobson and Mark Solms.
“Hobson argues that dreams are ad hoc frameworks for meaningless signals, whereas Solms uses psychological evidence to argue that dreams are indeed the expressions of wish-fulfilment” (page 50).
RAMoN Y CAJAL AND His Daughter
A very tragic event appears in Ramon y Cajal his dreams: the loss of his daughter.
“I take a walk by the bay (Santander?) and I fall into the water with one of my little daughters in my arms. I fight the waves, I am almost drowning, despite touching the seawall. The nightmare awakens me” (page 90).
One of his children, his daughter Enriqueta, died of the consequences of a bacterial disease. According to is biography (see literature) he stayed in his laboratory while he did not hear, or chose to ignore the cries of his wife who was holding her.
RAMoN Y CAJAL AND HIS Duality
Santiago Ramon y Cajal had a very interesting dynamic in his life and in his work. He wanted to be an artist but became a scientist. He was charmed by hypnosis, but attributed dreams to the neurological activity of the brain.
When he got his Nobel Price in 1906, he had to share it with his opponent Golgi. He used the method of Golgi to make neurons visible. Camillo Golgi proposed that every neuron in the brain is a network on its own: this is called the rectangular theory.
Cajal showed, using the technique of Golgi that nervous tissue, like other tissues, is made of discrete cells.
After winning the big Nobel Price which he had to share with his opponent, Cajal summarised this never ending duality in his life with these words: “What a cruel irony of fate to pair, like Siamese twins, united by the shoulders, scientific adversaries of such contrasting character.”
CONCLUSION
PRO
- This book will give you nice overview of the history of neurology and dreams;
- It is written in a very readable way;
- You will get to know Santiago Ramon y Cajal as a very romantic soul who had an interesting life;
- The opposition in his character of being a tender romantic soul as well as a scientists who only looks at facts speaks clearly in his dream about his daughter.
- The book is given its length of 144 pages rather expensive:
- I was a little bit disappointed that the dreams of Ramon y Cajal were rather short and that there was no further information available. The first part of the book gives this information, but the dream-part would have been juicier when there had been a certain form of analysis.
Mindfunda verdict:
7/10
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Literature:
Durán, G. and Alonso, F. Cajal Vida y obra 2nd edition (Barcelona: Editorial Cientifico-Medico 1983)
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Dreams have changed my life–and they continue to do. I’ll never forget having a numinous dream in which the Dalai Lama told me just what I should do in my spiritual practice. Dream me was so blissed out that she said to herself, “I’m glad this is being recorded because I’m so blissed that I won’t remember what he’s saying.” Then the Dalai Lama turned into a Middle Eastern woman doing a beautiful and somewhat erotic dance in the shape of an infinity symbol with me in the center where the two parts of the symbol touch. Of course when I woke up, there was no recording. I had to work out my own spiritual practice (as is always the case). Follow that dancer!
I loved learning a little about Cajal and his “mystical” thoughts about cells and his place in early neurology and psychology. Living with a physicist who loved Jung and opera for so long, I know the power of a scientist who is also a dreamer with a romantic soul.
What a lovely dream Elaine, thank you for sharing. I had an infinity dream once as well (https://mindfunda.com/mindfunda-books-book-reviews/a-dreamers-guide-to-the-land-of-the-deceased/) I see that i have not written about that dream yet, but I based my book about dreaming about the deceased on the infinity of energy (patterns). Energy never stops, and in my dream I was flying through an infinity fold. I only needed to pay close attention so I could curve my body through the round edges of the infinity. It gave me the idea to interpret dreams as representations of energy. Usually in a dream there is a conflict or obstruction. If you look at the origin of the obstruction, it can either be personal, social, physical or mental. If you have identified the obstruction, you need to do something in waking life to get the energy in that part moving again.
For example, one of the dreams was about a lady who met her deceased father and he taught her astronomy. In waking reality he always was very rational about it. So using this model I advised her to write a letter to her father thanking him for all he taught her. I encouraged her to take lessons in waking life and to go on talking i to her father about all the new knowledge she had gained thanks to the dream he had given her.
I like the shape-shifting trickster part of the Dalai Lama too. He is both male and female, a very balanced energy that encourages energy to flow.
What a lovely overview/review of this book Susanne thank you. Mark Solms is one of our own, here in South Africa (he also owns a wine farm in which the workers have shares or co-own the farm so I admire him for that too).
The eternal question – from whence do dreams come? Well, the first point would be that they come from the dreamer him/herself. An outer event may be the ‘hook’. The message from the dream from one’s own self is not to be ignored. It is a valuable form of expression, whether neurological or soulful.
No, I do not think dreams are mere wish fulfilment – even if they are, that would be a good starting point also … this reminds me of someone who told me a dream after which that person said that he made it up … he didn’t have it he said, just wanted to see what I would say. To which I remarked well, it was your made up dream, let’s have a look at it …
Hi Susan,
Yes, when I was writing my course on Dreaming about the Brain
which features the three most important scientific views on dreams, I came across a Ted Talk Mark Solms gave about his farm. It is quite impressive in its honesty: “self-interest is a great equalizer”.