Freudian and Jungian Literary Analysis: Under Milk Wood

Freudian and Jungian Literary Analysis to a kickoffer place draw WoodExploration of hallucinations, symbols and archetypes in Dylan doubting doubting doubting Thomas cope with for voices Under Milk WoodThis paper opineks to assert that Dylan Thomas play Under Milk Wood drop be successfully viewed apply Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic techniques. It will attempt to not still isolate and cotton up legion(predicate) a(prenominal) represents of typical mental symbolism in the land at just also what could be thought of as psychoanalytic tools especially as they relate to Freuds looks of the Dreamwork in his The Interpretation of Dreams (1997) or Jungs archetypes and embodied unconscious(p)(p).By doing this I hope to not only subject Thomas work to a rigorous psychoanalytic exegesis, exposeing hidden personal symbols, social systems and images, but also highlight the psychosocial depth of Under Milk Wood a depth that has hitherto been overlooked by some critics . Through this I hope to assess the opinion that Thomas was every bit as deflectd by Freud and Jung as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were a generation earlier.I will begin, in my Introduction, to give an outline of the magnificence of Freud and analysis to post-World War hotshot literature and what Dylan Thomas place within that was paying particular attention to Thomas own assertions on the importance of analytic thinking in his work and the ways that it was greeted by the literati of the 1930s and 40s.The first chapter will be dedicated to a discussion of Under Milk Wood and its creation, looking at at such atomic government issue 18as as plot construction, the structural character of the piece and its creative aetiology.From here I will go on to discuss the caprice of the Freudian dreamwork and its manifestations in Under Milk Wood. The dreamwork, exemplified by such c at oncepts as condensation, displacement and secondary adjustment, is a central concept in the Fre udian hit and, as such, has become an important interpretive tool for two psychoanalysts and literary critics.It is with this in mind that I shall attempt to isolate instances of all four of the study(ip) mechanisms of the dreamwork in Thomas play whilst relating them to the wider issues of poetic creativity and narrative structure. I will also offer a brief discussion of how Jungs interpretation of dreams differed from Freuds before going on to examine how both washbowl be phthisisd to inform us of Thomas play.The third chapter will be dedicated to Jungian archetypes. I will isolate and discuss the many instances of archetypal imagery in the play, paying special attention to the way in which they fit in with Thomas over all poetic esthesis as it is displayed in his expenditure of language, narrative and plot. This chapter will also examine the role of the collective unconscious and relate it to the Modernist technique of the stream of consciousness novel and the works of Ja mes Joyce and Virginia Woolf.My conclusion will attempt to answer the main hypothesis of this paper, that indeed psychoanalytic techniques and knowledge can be employ to understand Dylan Thomass play and also what that says about the dramatists role as a modern day bard.Introduction The analytical RevelationThomas Manns paper The Significance of Freud published in 1936 gives us some indications as to the importance of early psychoanalysis on the literary behavior of Europe and AmericaThe analytic revelation is a revolutionary force. With it a blithe scepticism has come into the universe of discourse, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. one time roused and on alert, it cannot be put to sleep once a elucidate. It infiltrates life, undermines its raw navet, takes from it the strain of its own ignorance (Mann, 1965 591)As Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane assert in their study contemporaneousness A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (199 1), this revolutionary force was a large constituent of early twentieth century notions of, not only modernness in literature and the arts but also, what it meant to be a modern man or woman.The early Modernist writers of the inter-war period not only embraced Freud and psychoanalysis as heralding a immature paradigm of self-sufficiency and ontological autonomy but also, as a journal entry by Andre Gide exposes, thought themselves part of an alert groundswell of thought that was, above all, quintessentially newFreudFreudianismFor the last ten years, or fifteen, I stool been indulging in it without knowing. (Gide, 1967 349)The connection between psychoanalysis and literature has of all time been problematic. Freud, himself asserts in the opening paragraphs to his essay The Uncanny (2005) that only r atomic number 18ly (does) a psycho-analyst (feel) impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics (Freud, 2000 1), however writers, critics and however Freud himself have do ex tensive use of the interpretive similarities between the two disciplines . Not only argon there are a whole host of studies devoted to the use of psychoanalysis in literary criticism but in the Introduction to his novel The White Hotel (1999), D.M. Thomas draws attention to the extraordinarily literary quality of Freuds case studies each containing many of the tropes and leitmotifs one would normally associate with a creative work. For Freud, the psychical mechanisms of creative writing and dreaming are in, some senses at least, inextricably linked. two are based in a tripartite system of ideational fantasy formation consisting of a current positioningal issue or concern that provokes the memory of a childhood incident or trauma which, in turn, shapes some emerging action in the guise of a propensity fulfilment. Freud sets out the relationship between this system and literature in his essay Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (Freud, 1986)We are perfectly aware that very many imag inative writings are far removed from the dumbfound of the nave daydream and to that extent I cannot suppress the suspicions that even the approximately extreme deviations from that model could be linked with it with an uninterrupted series of transitional cases. (Freud, 1986 150)Freud continues to explain the disparity between the mind of the creative writer and the ordinary day-dreamer, asserting that whereas the last mentioned results in a self-conscious repression of desire (the wishes of the day-dreamer organism best left unspoken) the former revels in and promulgates such desire, translated as it is by artistic skill and constitutionThe writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal that is aesthetic yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. (Freud, 1986 153)This essay, mayhap more than any other work of Freuds, highlights for us the attraction of psychoanal ysis to early twentieth century writers. Metaphysically and spiritually sceptical after the mass slaughter of the First World War and the alienation engendered by rise of the industrial paradigm, Freudian speculation offered (as testified by Manns essay) a distinctly human, non-metaphysical and wholly scientific ex meanation for the place of the artist within society. For Freud, the artist was distinct from the rest of the populous but this had a purely psychical aetiology, leaving no imperative for notions of religious or supra-human inspiration.This is undoubtedly some of the attraction of Freudianism for Dylan Thomas who, throughout his earns and early work asks both use and reference to writers and critics that were, themselves, heavily influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis. Francis Scarfe, in the essay Dylan Thomas A Pioneer (1960) cites Freud as a major influence on the formation of Thomas early poetic voice, derived in the main from his experiences with what Scarfe calls Sitwellism (Scarfe, 1960 96)The dominant points of contact keep an eye onms to be James Joyce, the Bible and Freud. The personal habits of language and mythology of Dylan Thomas can readily be identified through these three sources. (Scarfe, 1960 96)If Joyce lent the young poet some of the lyricism and sense of narrative and the Bible some of the rich measuring stick and verbal poetics, Freud enabled Thomas to look within his own unconscious and go up images and leitmotifs that would find resonance with the rest of humanity as, firstly, personal then increasingly Bardic and archetypal symbols form the basis of his work.An early poem of Thomas clearly mirrors the hyperbole of Freuds first lectures on psychoanalysis the poet and the analyst both evoking the image of the journey into an unknown by an antonymous but courageous individualThe midnight road, though young man tread unknowking. Harbouring some thought of heaven, or haven hoping. Yields peace and plenty at the end. (Thoma s, 1990 119)We can compare this to Freuds famous analogy that is evoked throughout his workThe interpretation of dreams is in fact the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious it is the securest foundation of psycho-analysis and the field in which evey worker must conduct his convictions and seek his training. If I am asked how one can become a psycho-analyst, I reaction By studying ones own dreams (Freud, 1957 60)Interestingly, Thomas himself was reluctant to acknowledge his debt to Freud, choosing instead to suggest a notion that we have already posited here that Freuds influence is paradigmatic. He says in the collection of interviews Notes on the Art of Poetry (1963) that his writing is influenced by Freud only through the work others , itself a testament to the extent that Freudian theory and, indeed, the whole of psychoanalytic thought has permeated the very fabric of modern literature.Thomas notebooks poems, his earliest poetic statements, are suffused with what we shal l see are Freudian images, inspired perhaps not by psychoanalysis itself but by the poets interest in Surrealism and their early antecedents the 18th century Metaphysical poets.Works such asWhere once the waters of your faceSpun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,The dead turns up its eye (Thomas, 1990 217)AndIn wasting one drop from the hearts honey cells.One treasured drop that, for the moment, quellsDesires pain (Thomas, 1990 133)Clearly reflect the artistic tenants set out in Bretons Manifestoes of Surrealism (1972) that sought to combine Freudian concepts of the dreamwork with aesthetic creation . As we shall see in the first chapter of this paper, this delight in the surreal as it relates to the Freudian image remained with Thomas throughout all of his working life and, most certainly, manifests itself in Under Milk Wood.The analytic revelations then, of Freud , have not only influenced those writers such as Breton, Auden and Woolf who are were intimately acquainted with his writing but also writers identical Dylan Thomas who, by his own ad rush, came to psychoanalysis through other creative writers works.This paper, like many others, uses psychoanalytic theory as a methodology with which to un viewing latent symbols, patterns and structures within Thomas work. It will not only relate such symbols to the poets own poetic vision but will, through Jungian theory, flesh out these so that they encompass universal archetypes and concepts such as the collective unconscious that structures the unconscious and, inevitably finds its way into works of a creative genius .Chapter One To Begin at the BeginningDylan Thomas play for voices Under Milk Wood began life as a small radio broadcast chill out Early One Morning (Sinclair, 1975, Jones, 1963) and this short piece is easily recognisable as the genesis for the larger work. There are, for instance, many of the same basic characters the milkman placid lost in the clangour and music of Welsh-spoken dreams (Tho mas, 1992), the sea captain, the lonely lady Miss May Hughes and even the tragic-comic Mrs Ogmore Pritchard. There is the same sense of poetic cadence that constantly adds to the somatic quality of the writing, lulling the reader into a musical trance as sibilance and assonance is combined with Thomas particular inner rhythms, such as in this extractThe sun lit the sea-town, not as a whole, from topmost down reproving zinc-roofed chapel to empty-but-for-rats-and-whispers grey warehouse on the harbour, but in separate bright pieces. (Thomas, 1978 15)The story, recited by Thomas himself in 1944 on the BBC, describes the still sleeping town of New Quay in Cardiganshire (Maud, 1992) and weaves external description with inseparable monologue as the narrator flits in and out of the dreaming consciousnesses of the towns inhabitants. In the story, each paragraph brings a new image or a new perspective but what we are ultimately presented with is the stream of consciousness of the narrator in the story, unlike in Under Milk Wood, an impersonal but totally discernable IQuite early one first light in the winter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and greenish as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house, where I had come to stay for a c one-time(a) unseasonable holiday Thomas, 1978 15)It is this point, this appearance of the personal pronoun that, as we shall see, makes Quite Early One Morning markedly different to Under Milk Wood. Thomas, however, retains the sense of dreamy absurdity, as images are put for comic effect amid the repeated refrain of The town was not yet awake.Under Milk Wood grew out of this humble head branch and is both markedly similar and surprisingly different . Both works reflect, as Derek Stanford (1954) suggests, the cadences, characterisation and plot construction of Joyces Ulysses (1979), creation as they are the collective narratives of a whole town in the same time period. Both works, ho wever, are also embryonic, Quite Early One Morning obviously being a blueprint for Under Milk Wood but this also being merely a fragmentary snapshot of a larger intend work that was never finished (Jones, 1986 ix).Under Milk Wood also resembles the cyclical structure of Joyces other great work Finnegans Wake (1992). Thomas play collapses with references to lines and commencements we have, for instance, the famous first linesTo begin at the beginningIt is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starlessAnd bible-black (Thomas, 2000 1)That not only evokes the biblical In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Gen, 11) but also the creational sense of Joyces reference to the beginnings of mankind in the opening lines of his novelriverrun, past Eve and Adams, from geld of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation backbone to Howth castle and Environs. (Joyce, 1992 3)In Under Milk Wood, the cyclical nature of the day is metonymous with the seasonal nature of the year and this with the life of a human being as Thomas juxtaposes images of beginnings, babies and births with ageing, infirmity and death as in this passageAll over town, babies and old men are cleanedand put into their broken prams and wheeled on tothe sunlit cockled cobbles or out into the backyardsunder the dancing underclothes, and left. A baby cries.(Thomas, 2000 27)As we shall see, this notion of the circle, of repeating is important to both Freud and Jung Freud through his insistence on the importance of the return in notions such as repression and the death drive and Jung, through his concept of the mandala as a recurring symbol. Like Joyce, Thomas displays circles within circles, as the plot and structure of the work as a whole mirrors the framework of the characters lives and psyches. We see this reflected in many of the plays most successful characters, witness for instance the constant iteration of Mrs Ogmore Pritchard, as she repeats her life ove r and over again with different husbands, only to have them revisit her after their deathsMr Ogmore, linoleum, retired, and Mr Pritchard, failed bookmaker, who maddened by besoming, swabbing and scrubbing, the voice of the vacuum cleaner and the fume of the polish, ironically swallowed disinfectant, fidgets in her rinsed sleep, wakes in a dream and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore, dead Mr Pritchard, ghostly on any side. (Thomas, 2000 10)The same can be said, of course, for Captain Cat, whose dreams and waking life are characterised not by the dead per se, but by their return as he witnesses the phantasmatic manifestations of either his repression or the collective unconscious (whether one is citing Freud or Jung). The sense, in Under Milk Wood, is that of a blithe acceptance of the passing of time and the knowledge that things return the sunrise, the Spring and the dead. This is reflected in many of Thomas poems, for instance in the closing lines of I See the Boys of SummerI am the man your father was.We are the sons of flint and pitch.Oh see the poles are kissing as they cross(Thomas, 1990 219)In this, also, as Karl Jay Shapiro asserts in his study In Defense of Ignorance (1960), Thomas work clearly reflects what was a seminal poem for the young poets generation W.B. Yeats The Second Coming (1987) which contains images of both beginnings and circles within circles. In the next chapter I will look at how these aspects of Under Milk Wood can be interpreted through the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung, paying attention specifically to their concepts of dreams and dreaming again another leitmotif of Thomas play that can be seen to come from Joyces Finnegans Wake.Chapter Two The Dreamwork, the symbol and Captain CatFreud On Dreams As Richard Wollheim suggests, Freuds theories on dreams are the most remarkable single element (Wollheim, 1971 66) of his psychoanalytical project and Freud himself in his essay On Dreams (1991) stresses the primacy of dream interpretation in his systemThe transformation of the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream-content deserves all out attention, since it is the first instance known to us of psychical square being changed over from one mode of expression to another. (Freud, 1991 89)For Freud, dreams serve as symptoms of unconscious repression in the same way as parapraxes (slips of the tongue) and instances of forgetfulness. The content of dreams can, he said, be split into the latent and the manifest the one providing a shield for the other as the Unconscious gives up its fissures and problems that have been repressed by the Ego during waking hours. Freuds work The Interpretation of Dreams attempts to provide a full scale, largely scientific study of not merely the symbolism of dreams but also their mechanism a mechanism that he termed the dreamwork.The dreamwork can be thought of as a offshoot (Wollheim, 1971) that transcribes the latent content of dreams into the language of the manifes t. Freud is clear in The Interpretation of Dreams that psychoanalysis does not deal with the simple translation of images or primitive notions of symbol exchange that sees dreams as merely scripts that can be easily interpreted utilize a universal dictionary, although he does acquiesce to the point that some symbols recur on a universal level.Instead, Freud sees dreams as the return of repressed desires and their attendant wishes that find a voice in the psychical economy through a process of disguise. The desire, as Richard Stevens (1983) suggests, will be fused with experiences and thoughts from the previous day or even events occurring during the course of the night (Stevens, 1983 30). The dreamwork, in the Freudian system, is both the mechanism of disguise and the tool of interpretation because it contains an internal logic that can be used by the analyst to trace the source of repression and, through the process of transference, brought into the conscious and rendered harmless (Freud, 1997).Perhaps the most important concept within The Interpretation of Dreams is the four-fold dreamwork mechanism that can be used, not only in dream interpretation but as we shall see, in the critical appreciation of literature. Freud termed these mechanisms condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision and before I go to look at how each one fits into Under Milk Wood specifically I would like to, briefly, offer up an explanation as to how each effects the manifest dream-content and ergo the literary image or trope.CondensationThis is, perhaps, the most common dream feature and is what gives dreams their sparse, confound quality. For Freud, dream-thoughts are many and varied, each bombarding the dreamwork simultaneouslyThe dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream-thoughts. The dream, when written down fills half a page the analysis, which contains the dream-thoughts requires six, eight, twelve times as much space. (Freud, 1997 170)Condensation manifests itself as images laden with meaning, as the unconscious overlays and condenses two or more dream-thoughts into one motif. instigate of the skill of the analyst according to Freud is the extent that such condensation can be unravelled and successive layers of unconscious meaning and repression peeled back and revealed (Freud, 1965 313).Whereas Freud was dubious as to the possibility of ever reaching a definitive dream interpretation because of the very nature of condensation, he also asserted that the ways in which dream-thoughts are condensed gives the analyst a clue as to their psychical meaning. Freud cites his own dream of the Botanical Monograph as an example of the way in which different dream-thoughts can be condensed into one dream-image the latent meaning only becoming apparent when this relationship is exposed .DisplacementDisplacement refers to the substituting of elements within dreams. Due to the nature of the uncon scious, elements and images that have a similar psychical economy invariably end up being displaced, one for the other. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud characterises displacement as constituting a de-centring of the dream-thoughtsWe may have noticed that these elements which obtrude themselves in the dream-content as its essential components do not by any means play this same part in the dream-thoughts. ( Freud, 1997 190)Displacement, like condensation, arises from the synchronous nature of the unconscious and manifests itself in two ways firstly, through the substituting of dream-thoughts, so that dreams can appear absurd and illogical and, second through shifting meanings an image may possess one meaning in one nights dream and another on a different night. Melanie Klein, for instance, in her essay Psychological Principles of Early Analysis(1991) offers us some interesting insights into how displacement works in something other than the dream the child at play.My analyses a gain and again reveal how many different things, dolls for example, can mean in play. Sometimes they stand for the penis, sometimes for the child stolen from the mother, sometimes for the little patient itself and so forth (Klein, 1991 134)Both condensation and displacement have been used as the basis for theories of Surrealist aesthetics, as Carrouges and Prendergast assert in their study Andre Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism (1974 192) which uses seemingly disparate images juxtaposed in order to create an illogical, dream-like tableaux.RepresentationRepresentation refers to the dreamworks tendency to present feelings, repressions and notions as images and symbols. Unlike many pre-Freudian systems of dream interpretation such symbolisation is centred, to a very large extent, around the dreamers own personal history and psychology. However as I have already stated there are, due to the inter-subjective nature of the psyche, recurring symbols and motifs that can be found in a great many peoples dreams.Richard Stevens in his Freud and Psychoanalysis (1983) mentions just a few of themsmall boxes, chests, cupboards and ovens couple to the female organ also cavities, ships and all kinds of vessels. The actions of climbing ladders, stairs, inclines or flying may be used to symbolise sexual intercourse having a haircut, tooth pulled or being beheaded, castration. (Stevens, 1983 33)Secondary RevisionSecondary revision refers to the mental processes that occur after the dreamer awakes and that organises and places the otherwise absurd and disparate images and themes into a, relatively, cohesive narrative. Wollheim points to there being doubt in Freuds later work as to the place of secondary revision within the dreamwork (Wollhein, 1971 69) but, as a concept, it has been important in many neo-Freudian systems of aesthetics especially, as Charles Altman points out in his essay Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1986 526), by the French school of film critics who saw it as, not so much an inbuilt part of the dreamwork, but as the main constituent in narrative formation and the audience/film dialectic.Jung On DreamsDreams play as important a role in the work of Carl Jung as Sigmund Freud (Fordham, 1964) however the former not only sees their place in the psychical economy differently but has, as he explains in Man and his Symbols (1964), created an entirely separate process of interpretation and translation.Jung disagreed with Freuds notion of the dreamwork and his method of free association whereby the analysand recalls a dream and lets their mind vomit up through the myriad of different unconscious connections only to be unravelled and assessed by the analyst. For Jung, this process is likely to uncover neuroses and repression but is unlikely to uncover them connected with the dream. For Jung, the except away from the central motifs of the dream-image one gets the further away one travels from the locus of their meaning.Therefore, under a J ungian system, dreams consist not of personal motifs of repression returning through the dreamwork but as expressions of either the personal or collective unconscious. The method of extracting the meaning from dreams is centred around the correct reading of such symbols and an evaluation of how they relate to either the dreamers personal or their phyllogenetic background, as Jung himself assertsDreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature, they show us unvarnished, natural truth, and are then fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature. (Jung, 1989 55)Jung viewed the waking, conscious perceptions as having a penumbra of associated psychical meanings (Jung, 1964 28), even the very simplest of actions, for instance seeing or hearing, can involve a gamut of other ideational and experiential relations and it is this that we witness in dreams the whole of our unconscious unfettered by the ordering, the siphoning and the categorisation of the conscious mind.For Jung, then, the absurd quality of dreams, their surreal nature comes not from intervention of the dreamwork but from the cultural and personal associations attached to perceptions and experiences.Thomas On DreamsBoth Freuds and Jungs systems of dream interpretation offer us important critical tools with which to view Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood both in terms of the images and symbols the playwright uses in order to convey the sense of the somatic and the dream-like and his use of surrealism as a semi-comic trope throughout the piece.The play begins in the collective dream of the town. respectable like the short story Quite Early One Morning, the audience is taken on a journey through the consciousnesses of the sleeping townsfolk as they dream their separate dreams, shaped (as both Freud and Jung assert) by their individual consciousnesses and personalities. Captain Cat, for e xample, experiences the return of the repressed guilt he feels towards his long dead shipmatesCaptain Cat, the retired concealment sea-captain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of Schooner House dreams ofSecond fathom never such seas as any that swamped the decks of the S.S. Kidwelly belly over bedclothes and jellyfish-slippery sucking him down salt deep into the Davy dark (Thomas, 2000 2)Thomas, here, reflects both Freudian and Jungian dream analysis as Captain Cats dreams abound with symbols of his past and are unmistakably suffuse with the characters own visual lexicon, what Jung calls the dream language (Jung, 1986 33). The same can be said of Dai Bread who dreams of harems, Polly Garter who dreams of babies and even Nogood Boyo who dreams of nothing.However, within the very text edition of Under Milk Wood we notice each one of the four elements of the Freudian dreamwork. The dense language is a clear instance of condensation the vi tal elements of the imagistic leitmotifs are extracted and pile one on top of another, as adjective combines with adjective to form the quintessentially Thomasian poetics, such as here where the playwright draws a finely tuned portrait of Mrs Dai Bread One, the wife of the bakerMe, Mrs Dai Bread One, capped and shawled and no old corset, gracious to be comfy, nice to be nice, clogging on the cobbles to stir up a neighbour. Oh, Mrs Sarah, can you spare a loaf, love? Dai Bread forgot the bread. Theres a lovely morning Hows your boils this morning? (Thomas, 2000 22)Thomas both describes the sense of a dream here and, through condensation, utilizes its mechanism. Words and phrases are juxtaposed and their meaning condensed in a way that mirrors roughly exactly the workings of Freuds dreamwork. We see this reflected many times throughout the narrative of Under Milk Wood, as the author evokes in a linguistic sense what Freud saw in a psychoanalytic sense.We see, for example a clear lite rary rendering of displacement in the absurd portrait of Cherry Owen as described by the Second VoiceCherry Owen, next door, lifts a tankard to his lips but nothing flows out of it. He shakes the tankard. It turns into a fish. He drinks the fish. (Thomas, 2000 13)Here the absurd image of a fish replaces or displaces the tankard that Cherry Owen drinks from adding to the dreamy quality of the early passages of the play. As a cultural symbol, the fish also mirrors the third of the Freudian mechanisms, representation, whereby a linguistic notion He drinks like a fish is rendered in a quasi-comic symbolic form.Of course, the ultimate use of dreams and dreaming in Under Milk Wood is the plot itself. Both Freud and Jung rely heavily on the concept of the return within their respective dream philosophies (Stevens, 1983 Fordham, 1964) and this is reflected in the very structure of the play that could, after all, be thought of as merely the manifest dream-content of the First Voice, or perh aps even Thomas himself.Like a dream, the text iterates, as we shall see in the next chapter, the same basic images and archetypes the symbols are at once full of meaning in themselves and signifiers for other things. The First Voice can be seen as the voice of God but also of secondary revision, knitting disparate elements together to form a narrative that can be followed and engaged with.As the characters awake, their lives, as they are described by the First and Second voice, are shown to be no less absurd than the irrationality of their dreams. This is perhaps because the entire play can itself be seen as a dream of the authors in which he creates, as he states in a letter to A.G. Prys Jones, a never-never Wales (Thomas, 1985 848) that, like its Peter Pan counterpart, is as much a manifest wish of its author as anything else.Chapter Three The Shadow, TKelloggs business sector line Strategy Success Factors and BarriersKelloggs Business Strategy Success Factors and BarriersIntro ductionThe importance of nodes and their value plays a major role and cannot be neglected by the companies in todays business world. The implementation of different new strategies and food marketing plans will not help if the companies do not pay attention to the clients. Any ships confederations marketing plan agenda should and will always include customers. Customer focus and retention is a powerful strategic advantage that helps to increase the profitability of the company and to belong in the high competitive environment. The different consumers across the world might lead to varying consumer demeanours which result in identifying varying concepts by decision devising units to sell the products.In a company like Kelloggs the purchasing process is dependant on consumer behaviour. The buying pattern of the consumers has an influence on directly connect phenomena as well as post marketing phenomena. Kelloggs has seen a downfall in sales in the past decade and still continue s to see. There is a huge discussion in the EU market about the food nutrition and labelling and the negative media image produced about the products of the company. The Kelloggs products are criticised by food standardized agency (FSA) as red products and junk food. They said that the company is trying to show their products wellnessier than they actually are. These statements and actions of FSA has not only affected the overall business and its image but also the consumer attitude towards the products. This report talks about how Kelloggs can resolve the issue by use marketing research and customer focused outline.Company ProfileKelloggs is the worlds largest cereal maker since 1906 and is located in the United States. Kelloggs products has become a part of the delicious mornings for the people around the world since a century. Its business is operated in two segments Kelloggs North America and Kelloggs International. 66% of the revenue to the company comes from North America r egion which consists of the Canada and the United States. The remaining 34% comes from the Kelloggs international market which consists of Europe (20%), Latin America (8%) and Asia Pacific (6%). The products vary from ready-to-eat cereals to convenience foods such as cereal bars, cookies, toaster pastries, crackers, frozen waffles, snacks and veggie foods. obesity and Health Wellness is the primary concern for people in the world today. Kelloggs has invested on this trend by introducing many health focused products like Kelloggs, Pop-Tarts, Cheez-It, Mini-Wheats, Nutri-Grain, sift Krispies, Keebler, Special K, Chips Deluxe, Famous Amos, Morningstar Farm, Sandies, Eggo, Austin, Club, Murray, Kashi, Bear Naked, Gardenburger,All-Bran,and Stretch Island. The demand for its products came from the continuous advertising since 1906. The main competitors are General foods, Quaker Oats, General Mills and Ralston-Purina. It started out in Battle Creek, Michigan with 44 employees which event ually has grown into a multinational company with 30,000 employees. The manufacturing of its products is pickings place in 18 countries and selling them over 180 countries successfully with the implementation of intelligent strategies and leadership.Key Success FactorsThe main key factors for Kelloggs Success are it perceived to have a healthy image when compared to other daily breakfasts and snacks like chocolates and crisps. They made the products convenient enough so that they can be carried anyplace easily. They offer a range of cereal bars which are quite useful for people on the morning rush. Few Kelloggs products are really diverse as moms can give them as a snack between breakfast and lunch to their kids. Sodium content in the food is a major issue that the company has to deal with. Kelloggs are trying to recrudesce products with less salt content and including more amount of fruits in the bars and cereals for people with health concerns. They have created a high level of brand awareness in the people which allowed them to win the customer loyalty. They have designed various products since a century for all age groups from childrens to adults. Innovation has influenced Kelloggs market to a greater extent. Introducing new products according to the changing markets and tastes of people from time to time has made Kelloggs to win the customers. They offered the products at a lower price which made an average household to afford, hence retaining the customers at large. Kelloggs market its products itself. It do not manufacture cereals for any other company who sells them under their own brand. All these factors added for the company to run successfully and become the world market leaders in the highly competitive market.StrategyKelloggs charge was to be the food company of choice and also make customers understand the importance of a balanced lifestyle which can be achieved by their products. The mission is to drive sustainable growth through the power o f the people and brands by better serving the needs of customers, consumers and communities. Based on their vision and mission they crafted their strategy to achieve aims and objectives with the power of position and brand image. Kelloggs targeted various groups of people and deigned the products accordingly to attract their mind sets. Balanced Lifestyle is the broad strategic objective of the company. It enforced these strategies by some tactical plans like supporting the physical activity among all age groups and to sponsor these activities with the use of companies resources, the communication of the balance diet to consumers using the cereal packs, and also introduction of food labelling which would allow consumers to understand the balanced diet content of their products. Kelloggs has introduced the recommended Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) to their packaging labels. This allowed the customer to have a knowledge of the amount of nutrients in take in a serving of Kelloggs food. Their strategy is to attract customers by encouraging them to take part in the locomote programs organised by the company in relationship with the Amateur Swimming association (ASA). Kelloggs has sponsored almost 1.8 million awards every year to the swimmers. This idea of teaming up with ASA has helped the company to reinforce its brand image. It also has started many community programs and breakfast clubs to create awareness of their products in people. By all these activities it shows that the company is trying to create a good CSR image in the industry. Kelloggs believed that if consumers are given proper nurture about their products, they can retain them. So, they chose various methods to communicate their objectives to the world such as using cartoon characters, and also through effective advertising. It also distributed nutrition magazines for the employees to make them better understand about the objectives.SolutionIn a major business study about Kelloggs, it is seen that their consumers buying behaviour is mostly dependant on the companys focus towards customers and how well they treat them rather than manufacturing, pricing or merchandising of the products. Consumers tend to purchase the products which are more healthy. Hence they want to know all the available information about the products they want to buy or consume. The products information, beliefs, intentions and attitudes of the customers influence the decision process. So Kelloggs has to perform a market research on whether the consumers buy their products based on the label information or not. The visual revue of the product or the experience of purchasing the product play a major role in the decision making of the consumer. Advertising and promotion of the product might as well have a greater impact on the buying pattern. It is difficult enough to understand the consumer behaviour within the borders of a single country. Understanding and serving the needs of consumers from different coun tries can be daunting. The values, behaviours and attitudes of the consumers vary greatly across the world. Kelloggs must design the marketing programs and products according to the peoples needs. For example, in the United Kingdom where most people eat cereal regularly for their breakfast, Kelloggs should try persuading consumers to buy their brand rather than a competitors brand. In France, however where most people prefer croissants and coffee or no breakfast at all, it should advertise to convince people to eat cereal for breakfast and in India, where many consumers eat heavy fried breakfasts and skip meal all together, the company should make attempts to convince the buyers to shift to a lighter, more nutritious breakfast diet.To cover up the damage caused due to the labelling issue by FSA, Kelloggs Should determine the customers needs and convert them into requirements. In order to fulfil them, it should fully understand the current and future needs of the customers, identify the customers, determine their key product characteristics, identify and assess market competition, identify opportunities and weakness, define financial and future competitive advantages, ensure that it has commensurate knowledge about the regulatory requirements, identify the benefits to be achieved from exceeding compliance and also identify their role in the protection of community interests. Kelloggs can start launching some new products aimed at the health conscious consumers. They can start selling them for a lowest price in the market and revenge them with a good value products for every penny they spend. They can concentrate more on three groups of people like individuals, families and supermarkets who wanted to have a healthy diet. They can focus more on health conscious people from age group from 25-50 by promising them healthy diet with their products. By the introduction of these products in the market they can show the customers that Kelloggs is being paid attention to what they want and how important their health is to the company. They can start collecting information from consumers and people by conducting surveys about what kind of products they are actually looking for and based on that they can prepare them and position them to win the competitive advantage. So the only mantra to attract the customers again and to cover up the loss created by FSA is obsessive customer attention. Even though making health conscious customers well-chosen might affect the short term profits, yet it helps to acquire a loyal customer base which pays off in the future. Making these products available at all consumer stores and super markets at a lower retail price might assist in building up the brand image yet again. Advertisements play a crucial role in winning the brand image and loyalty of the customers. If the company tries to create an awareness about the product and the low price buying strategy, it would encourage the consumers to buy them that results in the greater sales of the product.Potential advantages by focusing on customersAwareness of changing dynamics of the consumer market will definitely help Kelloggs to gain a competitive edge in the cereal industry. The increasing trend of health consciousness and the changing tastes can be known time to time by extensive market research. The feed back from consumers and the surveys conducted will allow the company to learn about their drawbacks and work up on them. It enables the business to minimize price sensitivity, improve profitability, differentiate itself from the competition, improve its image in the eyes of customer, achieve a maximum number of advocates for the company, increases customer satisfaction and retention, enhance its reputation, improve provide morale, ensure products and services are delivered right first time, increase employee satisfaction and retention, encourage employee participation, increase productiveness and reduce costs, create a reputation for bei ng caring customer-oriented company, foster internal customer / supply relationships and also bring about continuous improvements to the operation of the company.Barriers to get the hangFor Kelloggs to win back its brand and image customer loyalty and becoming customer focused organisation there are some barriers to overcomeInternal Focus Rather than focusing on improving the output measures like revenue, cost and returns, the firm should pay attention to input measures like staff satisfaction and customer experience.Command and Control Culture A command and control culture in the organisation creates internal conflicts, poor communication and mistrust. This constrains the freedom of building customer relationships and also the exchange of knowledge for better growth of the company.Short Term Approach The company should not tend to fall back to the product-thinking strategy, instead it should hold on to the customer focus strategy and treat it as a long term initiative which migh t help acquire customer loyalty and retention to the firm.Inadequate Customer Data With small volumes of customer data it is difficult to analyse customers behaviour and manage relationships. So, they should always make sure that adequate amount of data is available on the customers to understand the buying behaviour patterns.Understanding the customers Though the company has gathered enough information, it is sometimes difficult to harness it. So it should try understanding the attitudes and beliefs of the customer.ConclusionLabelling on food products plays a major role in the decision making process of a consumer. The buying behaviour of consumers is richly embroidered by the labels available on the product. In the Kelloggs case labelling issues created a damage to the company. The best way for Kelloggs to recover from this situation is to use the launch of the new products as a strategic technique to win back the customers it has lost. The glue that hold the organisation together is strong customer focus. It acts as a fuel for an improving the brand image of the company. Every employee should be committed and dedicated towards their work in order to build a customer focused organisation. If Business neglects to create a true customer focus, they need to face huge unnecessary costs for poor service elevated due to the active promotion of the customers who are dissatisfied. This might result in investing extensively in marketing and advertising by the company to gain back the customers attention. The life blood of the organisation are the customers who allows the firm to realise their main goals and objectives to survive in the market and also to make a profit. Their behaviour helps the products to attain a recognition and allow them to last for longer periods. Consumer behaviours keep changing from time to time and the best thing the company could do is to develop strategic ways that make the consumers buy the products may it be old or new. So, customer foc used strategy is the only thing which keeps the companies alive and growing in this highly changing competitive market.