Chicago Psychoanalytic
French Jesuit missionaries in the 17th-century North American-Canadian border wrote extensively of the Huron and Iroquois, providing a wealth of anthropological knowledge on the American Indians of the region. Of particular interest is their description of the Iroquois’ ritual significance of dreams and the acting out and fulfillment of desires contained within the dream state. Anthropologist William N. Fenton notes Iroquois scholar Anthony F.C. Wallace as the first proponent of the psychoanalytic theory of Iroquois dream fulfillment, a sophistication owing to their adoration and ritual significance of the spiritual and supernatural nature of dreams that “was greatly superior to that of the most enlightened Europeans of the time.”(63)

