Jung- The Key Ideas

by Ruth Snowden

  Jung suggests that the first half of life is really concerned with nature – gaining a reputation, earning a living, raising a family. The second half of life can then be seen as concerned with culture. In primitive societies, it is almost always the old people who are the guardians of the mysteries and the laws that express the cultural heritage of the tribe. So what is going on in our modern society, with its cult of youth that makes older people frantically try to stay young forever? Where do the old people fit in? What has happened to their precious wisdom and vision?

  * * *

  Insight

  The cult of youth has also made us focus too much on rushing about, achieving and doing, even into an idealized fit and active old age. There seems to be no time any more to sit peacefully in a rocking chair, quietly reflecting and watching the world go by. I am beginning to suspect that actually we are missing out on something of vital importance here.

  * * *

  It is important at each stage of life to be able to look forward, and this is where religious beliefs can become very important, because they offer people a continuation of life, something greater to look forward to. Jung points out that it is impossible for us to know what happens to us after death. That being said, however, he says that a directed life is generally richer and healthier than an aimless one, and it is always better to go forwards with the stream of time. For this reason, he views religious belief in some kind of afterlife as healthy because it gives people the feeling of safety and security that enables them to keep on moving forward. He explains that because of the archetypes that make up the basis of the human psyche, we need beliefs of this sort rather as our bodies need salt: in other words, they are basic to our psychic well-being.

  With old age the psyche reaches the final stage in its cyclical journey. The first stage was childhood, where we are 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.

  * * *

  THINGS TO REMEMBER

  Jung insisted that the psyche is not a fixed, static entity, but changes and develops throughout life.

  It works on biological principals which are basic to the natural world and which provide it with its driving force.

  Jung suggested several basic principles at work in the psyche: The principle of opposites – everything in the psyche naturally has an opposite aspect – this principle is basic to all of nature.

  The principle of equivalence – equal amounts of energy are given to each of the opposites, otherwise energy may become blocked.

  The principle of entropy – this is borrowed from physics and describes the tendency for all systems to ‘run down’ as energy is evenly distributed.

  The journey of the psyche follows universal archetypal patterns that are reflected in rites of passage.

  In order to achieve individuation, it is important for us always to move forward with the flow of our lives and not get stuck in previous stages of development.

  Jung said that we are all born with a biological psychic blueprint, which includes important factors such as our sex. We are also affected by what happens to us in life.

  He said that the first half of life should be concerned with establishing ourselves in the world, and the second half with more spiritual concerns.

  * * *

  6

  Dreams and symbols

  In this chapter you will learn:

  why dreams are so important in understanding the psyche

  where dreams come from

  how we can analyse our dreams and use them for personal development.

  The importance of dreams

  Dreams were enormously important to Jung throughout his life and they are one of the key aspects of Jungian analysis. For Jung dreams, archetypes and other mental imagery have a separate psychic reality of their own, just as our thoughts have: they may give us valuable insights that ‘we’ would never have thought of. He did not claim to understand how this worked – in fact he said that he had no dream theory and did not know where they came from. However, Jung suggests various different functions that dreams serve:

  to act as compensation for areas of the conscious mind that are deficient or distorted in some way

  to bring back archetypal memories from the collective unconscious

  to draw attention to both inner and outer aspects of our lives of which we are not consciously aware.

  Jung’s ideas about dreams were very much influenced by Freud. It was Freud who had first realized the value of dreams as tools for exploring the psyche, and his theories gave Jung a starting point for exploring and developing theories of his own. This time it was Freud who was the pioneer, and Jung who built further upon what he had discovered. Freud saw dreams as neurotic symptoms, probably because nearly all his patients were in fact neurotic. He said that dreams are symbolic wish fulfilments of desires that have been repressed. These desires are mostly sexual. By exploring the hidden desire symbolized in a dream, one could begin to unravel a person’s neurosis. In its simplest form, a dream directly expresses a wish, for example a person who is hungry will dream of food. Freud saw dreaming largely as being a form of regression to childhood and the instinctive forces and images that dominate this time of our lives. In fact, he thought they were mostly manifestations of infantile sexual urges. Because these urges were unacceptable, they were suppressed and so the dream is a censored way of expressing what has been long buried. According to Freud, recent events and desires in a person’s life hold a minor role in dreams – they usually only appear if they somehow trigger one of the early repressed desires.

  Freud’s theory was that dreams allow the impossible to happen, and set aside the normal inhibitions of waking life. During sleep, forbidden wishes rise from the unconscious where they are normally kept under control during waking hours. As they attempt to come into the conscious mind, the brain monitors them and decides that they have disturbing content and must therefore be suppressed for fear they disturb the sleeper. Dreams are then created in order to express the hidden wishes in a disguised form, so that the person can go on sleeping. So dreams are seen by Freud as guardians, allowing us to sleep peacefully.

  Jung felt that a dream always has an underlying idea or intention – it is expressing something important that the unconscious wants to say. A dream shows a person’s inner truth and reality, not necessarily as that person would wish it to be, but as it really is. Jung said that Freud’s theory was far too simplistic and the idea that dreams were simply imaginary fulfilments of repressed wishes was totally out of date. Jung thought that the concerns expressed in dreams were much more wide-ranging – they may contain truths, wild fantasies, memories, hopes and fears, even telepathic imagery and much more. For Jung, a dream is an important message from the unconscious that can act as a key to helping a person with their individuation process.

  Freud used dreams as important starting points for triggering off a free-association process. He would pick out a particular symbol in a patient’s dream 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 actual content of the dream, rather than spinning off at a tangent and analysing its separate components as Freud was inclined to do.

  Jung was urging that we listen to what the individual person has to say, and treat the dream as something unique to that person. In order to know and understand a person’s whole personality and psychic reality, it is vi
tal to realize that dreams and symbolic imagery have a very important role to play. Jung saw this insight as a turning point in his understanding of human psychology.

  Jung agreed with Freud when he said that dreams often arose from emotional upsets, in which complexes were frequently involved. These complexes were like tender spots in the psyche that easily reacted to external stimulus or disturbance. However, Jung pointed out that one can also explore complexes by means of word-association tests, meditation or conversation – they do not have to wait to be uncovered by a dream.

  * * *

  Insight

  In a word-association test, a person in a relaxed state is given a word and then tells the analyst all the trains of words and ideas that spontaneously come to mind.

  * * *

  Freud explained that dreams have a ‘manifest’ content (which is what the dream appears to be about) and a ‘latent’ content (which is the dream’s true, hidden meaning). Finding this hidden meaning will therefore unlock the secrets of the psyche.

  * * *

  Insight

  Freud said that the manifest part of a dream is the part that is consciously remembered. The latent part is not consciously remembered before analysis. A possible snag arises here of course, because it is impossible to prove whether the latent part actually existed at all before analysis. This means that it is all too easy for the analyst to ‘plant’ ideas.

  * * *

  Jung could not agree that dreams were just covering up suppressed material. He said that what Freud called the manifest content was actually the whole meaning of the dream. It was expressed in symbolic form simply because the unconscious operates in symbols and so tries to convey its ideas to our conscious minds in this way. Because the conscious mind tends to think in words rather than symbols, we need to translate the symbolic content of our dreams into a form we can more readily understand.

  * * *

  Insight

  Freud saw dreams as being a kind of cover up to disguise unacceptable thoughts that arise during sleep. The dream disguised these thoughts by a process of displacement, thus enabling the dreamer to stay peacefully asleep and not be roused by the disturbing thoughts. By displacement he meant the shifting of emotions attached to one idea onto another idea.

  * * *

  Their different approach to theories about dreams was another key factor in the rift that finally came between Freud and Jung. Eventually, Jung agreed to differ with Freud and developed his own ideas, but as with his theories about the development of the psyche, he never really set out a cut-and-dried theory about dreams as Freud had tried to do. He was not even sure that his way of working with dreams could be counted as a ‘method’. This did not mean, however, that he did not consider dreams to be of paramount importance in the individuation process.

  Symbols

  Freud believed that much of a dream’s content was disguised by means of symbols. Freudian symbols within dreams have become one of the most well-known aspects of psychoanalytic thinking. Freud believed that symbols had fixed meanings common to all humans, and therefore under certain circumstances it was possible to interpret a dream without actually questioning the dreamer – provided one knew a bit about the dreamer’s personality, life circumstances, and the impressions that preceded the occurrence of the dream. Jung was also interested in the symbolism that appeared in dreams, but for him the symbols produced by the unconscious mind had much deeper meaning than Freud had believed. Jung decided that 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 therefore he felt that they were very important for the growth of the psyche. In fact, Jung did not believe that Freudian symbols were actually symbols at all – they were merely ‘signs’ used to represent something already known about and universally recognizable, for example a pointy stick is a penis, a cave is a vagina and so on.

  Unlike a sign, 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 for joy and hope of good things to come. Symbols often occur spontaneously in dreams and also crop up as symbolic thoughts, acts and even situations. Sometimes inanimate objects are involved in symbolic events, for example the clock that symbolically stops when someone dies.

  * * *

  Insight

  Symbolization means representing an object or an idea by a different object or idea. For Freud, dream symbols were very straightforward. For example, pointy stick = penis. Jung argued that Freud’s idea of what constituted a symbol was too simplistic and that dream symbols could often have much richer, more involved meaning. He said that Freud’s symbols were merely ‘signs’ (think of a road sign for example).

  * * *

  Many symbols are not just meaningful for the individual but for society as a group. These are often religious symbols such as the ox, lion, man and eagle, which 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, cat and so on. 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 actually arise from spontaneous primeval dreams and fantasies.

  * * *

  Insight

  Primeval means ancient or primitive – in other words Jung was pointing out that many religious symbols have their origin in the collective unconscious.

  * * *

  Jung viewed dreams as fantasies that arise during sleep and said that a similar process goes on unconsciously even while we are awake, especially when we are under the influence of repressed or unconscious conflicts. 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 everything that goes on around us. This means that we actually perceive many more events than we register 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 its flower. Dreams are therefore seen by Jung as evidence of natural psychic activity and growth, rather than the neurotic symptoms that Freud believed they were. They help the psyche to resolve conflicts and to understand things in a new light; their symbolic content has a transcendent quality that helps the psyche towards healing and wholeness. This was so important to Jung that he considered working with symbols to be one of the key factors in analysis and always encouraged people to play creatively with the symbols that arose spontaneously in their dreams and fantasies and develop them further.

  The origins of dreams

  Jung regarded dreams as totally natural phenomena not under the control of the will. He explained that they always seek to express something which the conscious mind does not understand properly. There can be many different reasons for dreams, and Jung considers possible causes, including:

  physical causes, such as having eaten a huge meal before going to bed

  memory recall, which 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, including 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 actually ha
ppen. Recurring dreams may also fall into this category

  oracular dreams, also called ‘big’ dreams by Jung. 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.

  Jung agreed with Freud that dreams were partly woven from material from childhood and also from recent events in the dreamer’s life, but he also began to realize that there was a third source. Just as the human embryo develops through the stages of its evolutionary history, so the mind travels on its own evolutionary journey. Dreams therefore 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, recall of past events 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. Jung saw that they may begin to extend beyond personal life and its experiences, into the realm of the collective and mythological. But he never lost sight of the fact that he saw them as natural products that contributed to the overall balance of the psyche, working on the biological principles of homeostasis and survival of the individual.