by Ruth Snowden
Jung warns that we cannot live the afternoon of life as we did the morning: what was great in the morning will be seen to be little in the evening, and what was true in the morning will become a lie. At this stage it is essential to begin to explore the world within the psyche if we wish to stay psychologically healthy: we must begin to understand ourselves and our spiritual nature. But this is not always easy, and many people prefer to get stuck in the past, perhaps becoming endlessly moaning victims, tedious eternal adolescents or stuffy, boring old doctrinaires.
With old age, the psyche reaches the final stage in its cyclical journey. The first stage was childhood, where we were a problem to others, but not yet conscious of self-responsibility. Next came youth and middle age, with its conscious problems. The final stage is extreme old age, when we often once again become a problem for others. Although childhood and old age are very different stages, they have in common a submersion in the world of the unconscious, into which we must all ultimately vanish.
SUMMARY
Today we have focused on Jung’s key ideas about the psyche. A comparison of Jung’s and Freud’s understanding of the psyche can be illuminating. Freud posited an unconscious that is brimming with repressed, destructive (and usually sexual) desires that forever threaten to overthrow the smooth running of the conscious mind. Jung, by contrast, saw what he called the ‘personal unconscious’ as a much richer, more mysterious place, full of ‘complexes’ – psychic phenomena that tend to group together and can be positive or negative in their effect on the conscious mind.
We have also looked at Jung’s other revolutionary innovation – the collective unconscious. This is a still ‘deeper’ part of the psyche that is almost like a psychic blueprint that has been passed down through generations of humanity from its origins. The collective unconscious is the realm of the archetypes, the shared ‘primordial images’ that appear across all cultures and times (albeit in slightly different forms) and that help the individual and their psyche to grow through the stages of life.
FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)
1. How might we best describe Jung’s understanding of the psyche?
a) Conflict ridden
b) Destructive
c) Organic
d) Ancient
2. Complexes are characteristic of which part of the psyche?
a) The ego
b) The personal unconscious
c) The collective unconscious
d) None of the above
3. The immediate goal of Jungian analysis is…
a) To uncover childhood traumas
b) To root out negative complexes
c) To delve into the collective unconscious
d) None of the above
4. Which of the following is/are characteristic of the collective unconscious?
a) Archetypes
b) Complexes
c) Instincts
d) Dreams
5. To what does Jung compare the process of individuation?
a) The passage of the moon in the night sky
b) The hatching of a chick from an egg
c) The passage of the sun in the daytime sky
d) The blossoming and fading of a rose
6. What, in Jungian thought, is the libido?
a) Sexual energy
b) Physical energy
c) Psychic energy
d) None of the above
7. The Self, according to Jung, is…
a) The same thing as the ego
b) The individuated personality
c) The centre of consciousness
d) A|l of the above
8. The persona is…
a) The Jungian term for the personality
b) Another term for the ego
c) The social mask created and worn by the ego
d) Another term for an archetype
9. What, in Jungian thought, is homeostasis? The psychical property that seeks…
a) To maintain balance
b) Individuation
c) Entropy
d) Its opposite
10. Who would you say has a more difficult task passing through puberty?
a) Girls
b) Boys
c) Homosexuals
d) It’s hard for everyone!
Today we will look at the importance of dreams in Jungian thought and their central place in analytical psychology. Jung suggested various different functions that dreams serve and said that they can arise from many different sources. He said that he had no fixed dream theory: each dream has a meaning that is relevant to the individual, and thus it can help with the individuation process.
Interpretation should always be carried out by means of talking to the dreamer about the dream itself. Dreams can reflect many different aspects of the life of an individual and dream symbols may have relevance to society as a whole, as well as to the individual. Therefore, the analyst needs to have a good grasp of mythological ideas so that dreams can be looked at in a collective context. It is often helpful to look at a whole series of dreams that have a connecting theme, because this will lead to fresh insights.
THE IMPORTANCE OF DREAMS
For Jung, dreams, archetypes and other mental imagery had a separate psychic reality of their own. He suggested various different functions that dreams serve:
• They act as compensation for areas of the conscious mind that are deficient or distorted in some way.
• They bring back archetypal memories from the collective unconscious.
• They draw attention to both inner and outer aspects of our lives of which we are not consciously aware.
In Jungian analysis, dreams play a beneficial role.
Freud saw dreams as important starting points for triggering off the free-association process. He would pick out a particular symbol and see where the associated train of thought led. Jung felt that this approach was rather limited, for several reasons:
• It debases the rich symbolism and imagery contained in many dreams.
• It often leads one off on another path entirely, away from the original meaning of the dream.
• The dream expresses something that the unconscious is trying to convey – therefore, it is more important to look at the content of the dream.
Jung agreed with Freud when he said that dreams often arise from emotional upsets, in which complexes are also frequently involved. These complexes are like tender spots in the psyche that easily react to external stimulus or disturbance. However, Jung pointed out that complexes can also be explored by means of word-association tests, meditation, or conversation – they do not have to wait to be uncovered by a dream.
Jung felt that a dream always had an underlying idea or intention – it is expressing something important that the unconscious wants to say. The intention of the dream can act as a key to helping a person with their individuation process. This is why Jung felt it was important to concentrate on the content of the dream, rather than spinning off on a tangent. Once again, Jung is urging us to listen to what the individual patient or dream has to say. To know and understand a person’s whole personality and psychic reality, it is vital to realize that dreams and symbolic imagery have a very important role to play. Jung saw this insight as a turning point in his psychology.
Jung also began to understand that just as the human embryo develops through the stages of its evolutionary history, so the mind also travels on its own evolutionary journey. Dreams allow recall of past memories, right back into childhood and beyond, to the most primitive instincts from the collective unconscious. As Freud had already recognized, such recall can be very healing in some cases, filling in gaps in memory from infancy and bringing balance or enrichment to the adult psyche. The further a person goes into analysis, the more complex and symbolic their dreams tend to get. They begin to extend beyond personal life and its experiences, into the realm of the collective and mythological.
SYMBOLS
Jung was particularly interested in the symbol
ism that appears in dreams. The strange mythological fragments that appeared in his own dreams and fantasies and those of his patients were rich in archetypal symbolism. He found that they were often highly numinous in character and he therefore felt that they were very important for the growth of the psyche.
A symbol is a term, a name or an image that contains special associations in addition to its obvious everyday meaning. For example, a rainbow can be a symbol of joy and hope of good things to come. A symbol differs from a sign in that a sign is always less than the concept that it represents, whereas a symbol stands for something more than its obvious meaning. Symbols often occur spontaneously in dreams and also crop up as symbolic thoughts, acts and even situations. Dreams are not invented consciously – they occur spontaneously and are our main source of knowledge about symbolism. Sometimes inanimate objects are involved in symbolic events; for example, the clock that symbolically stops when someone dies.
Many symbols are not just meaningful for the individual, but are collective. These are often religious symbols, such as the ox, lion, man and eagle that represent the four evangelists in the Christian religion. Animals very often crop up as religious symbols. In Egyptian mythology, for example, the gods are represented as having attributes of animals such as the jackal, hawk and cat. This type of symbolism is used to express ideas that are beyond words. The origin of typical religious symbols is often attributed to the gods themselves but Jung says that they arise from spontaneous primeval dreams and fantasies.
As a Jungian analyst, how might you interpret a dream about a hare and a tortoise…?
A good deal of our perception of reality goes on at a subconscious level, because we are so bombarded with stimuli all the time that we could not possibly register them all. We perceive many more events than are registered consciously. Sometimes these events well up from the subconscious later on – perhaps in a moment of intuition or in a dream. We then realize that they hold emotional meaning or other significance. Jung says that dream symbols are mostly manifestations of the area of the psyche that lies beyond the control of the conscious mind. He likens the way in which the psyche spontaneously produces symbols to the way in which a plant produces a flower. Dreams are therefore seen as evidence of psychic activity and growth.
THE ORIGINS OF DREAMS
There can be many different causes of dreams and Jung discusses different aspects of the question of their origin.
• Physical causes: such as having eaten a huge meal before going to bed.
• Memory recall: this may be from the distant past, or just mulling over events from the previous day.
• Compensations: for things that one lacks in waking life. Such a dream may highlight a hidden wish or conflict. Recurring dreams are often attempts to compensate for particular defects in a person’s attitude to life. Such conflicts may date from childhood.
• Looking ahead: this includes warning dreams and those where we worry about forthcoming events, as well as the more mysterious precognitive dream. Crises in our lives often have a long unconscious history before they happen. Recurring dreams may also fall into this category.
• Oracular dreams: these are dreams that feel numinous and highly significant to the dreamer – the sort of dream that our ancestors would have interpreted as messages from the gods. They are sometimes precognitive.
ARCHETYPES IN DREAMS
Archetypal images and figures that appear in dreams are not the archetype itself – they are simply representations of it. For example, a dream of the Virgin Mary could represent the divine mother archetype. Jung explains that archetypes are closely connected to instincts. Instincts, he says, are physiological urges, which can be perceived by the normal senses but can also manifest as symbolic images – these are the archetypes.
Archetypes sometimes appear in children’s dreams, like Jung’s own phallus dream. In Man and His Symbols, he gives an example of a whole series of dreams recorded and drawn by a ten-year-old girl. The archetypal content is very strong, including an evil, snake-like monster that comes and eats all the other animals, and a drunken woman who falls into water and emerges renewed and sober. So far as Jung was able to discover, these images were not related to any mythological ideas or religious beliefs that her family held.
ANALYSING DREAMS
For Jung, the dream story was not like a conscious story, with a logical beginning, middle and end. It was a complex intuitive structure, which must be viewed as a whole, rather than by being picked apart. He also felt that it was important to look at the imagery in the individual dream. Each image needs to be considered in turn, always looking at it within the context of the dreamer’s own life. For example, suppose someone dreams that they are using a stick to beat down a door. For Freud, this would be an obvious sexual symbol, with the stick representing a phallus. But Jung pointed out that it could mean something else entirely. The unconscious has deliberately chosen this particular symbol – the analyst’s task is to find out why.
Even common dream themes such as falling, flying and so on must be viewed in terms of the dream itself. Each dream arises from the individual psyche, in answer to specific circumstances and emotions. It is therefore not possible to lay down general rules for dream interpretation and we should be careful never to impose a meaning on somebody else’s dream. We can never fully understand another person’s dream and so it is vital to keep our own flow of associations in check. In Jungian analysis:
• the dream should always be treated as a fact – we should make no previous assumptions about it
• the dream is a specific creation from the unconscious that somehow makes sense, even if we cannot immediately see how
• we should explore the content of the dream thoroughly to try and find out what unconscious message is trying to emerge.
Dreams have a tendency to occur in series, each separate dream conveying an underlying message in a slightly different way. Jung found that, as a rule, a series of dreams was more useful for interpretation than a single dream. This is because important points become clearer with repetition, and mistakes in interpretation are often corrected by analysing a subsequent dream. The dream can be approached in various different ways.
• Objectively: the dream is considered in terms of the person’s real life in the external world. For example, if you dream that your car has broken down, perhaps the dream is telling you that it is time to take your car in for a service.
• Subjectively: the dream is considered in terms of what it represents within the person’s own personality. This time the car might represent yourself – perhaps there is a hidden health problem nagging away at your unconscious mind.
• Collectively: if the dream contains numinous, archetypal symbols then we can look towards the collective unconscious and mythological interpretations. For example, if a woman dreams about a brave young warrior, this could be her animus bringing her a message about her need to be more assertive.
JUNG’S HOUSE DREAM
Jung gives an example of a dream that he had about a house and uses it to describe some of the possible pitfalls of interpreting another person’s dream. In this dream he was exploring a house on various different levels. He began on the first floor, which was furnished in the style of the eighteenth century. Below this, the ground floor was dark and appeared to be furnished more in sixteenth-century style. The lower down he went, the more primitive the house became, and the cellar was Roman. In the floor of the cellar was a stone slab, which revealed the way down to a cave full of prehistoric bones and skulls.
When Jung analysed this dream he realized that it was a sort of summary of his own life. He grew up in a house that was about 200 years old, and his parents’ attitude was in many ways medieval. The lower levels illustrated his passionate interest in ancient history and palaeontology. However, when Jung discussed this dream with Freud, Freud became obsessed with the image of the bones and skulls. He kept returning to them over and over again, insisting that Jung try to find a wi
sh in connection with them. Jung soon realized that Freud was hinting at a hidden death wish, directed at Freud himself!
Jung realized that this was his dream, about his own private world. This was important because he came to understand that dream analysis is not a technique that can be learned and applied by following strict rules – it has to be done by means of discussion between two people. The danger is always that the analyst’s interpretation might dominate that of the client. Jung gave up using hypnosis for the same reason.