Jung’s way

The teaching

As C. G. Jung's analytical psychology teaches it.

The dream speaks plainly

For Jung a dream is not a disguise. Freud read the dream as a censored wish, its meaning hidden behind a façade; Jung held that the dream says what it means in the language of images, and that the difficulty lies only in our having forgotten how to read pictures. He called the dream a spontaneous self-portrait, in symbols, of the unconscious as it actually stands: a picture of where the dreamer is, inwardly, now.

Compensation

The dream's usual work, Jung taught, is to balance. The conscious mind takes up attitudes, and any attitude held too firmly leaves something out; the dream supplies what is missing. He gave three cases. When the waking attitude is one-sided, the dream takes the opposite side. When it is near the middle, the dream offers variations. When it is sound, the dream agrees with it and underlines it, while keeping its own independence. So the first question to ask of a dream is: what waking attitude might this be answering?

A person who thinks too highly of someone may dream of them shabby or small; a person who thinks too little of themselves may dream of being honoured. The dream is neither flattering nor insulting. It is restoring the balance.

The four acts of a dream

Jung observed that many dreams are built like a play in four acts. The exposition sets the place, the time and the people. The development thickens the plot as tension grows. The culmination, or turning point, is where something decisive happens or the scene changes sharply. The lysis is the outcome, the solution or the result. Some dreams break off before any lysis comes, and the reader notes where the play stopped.

Two levels of reading

Every figure in a dream can be read on two levels. On the objective level it is the real person it resembles, and the dream says something about the dreamer's relation to them. On the subjective level it is a part of the dreamer wearing that person's face: the reckless friend in the dream may be the dreamer's own recklessness. Jung used both, and taught that figures who matter greatly in the dreamer's life are more often to be read objectively, strangers and remote figures more often subjectively.

Amplification

Jung's way with an image is to stay with it and enrich it. First come the dreamer's own associations, kept close to the image: what is a well, to me, exactly as it was in the dream? Then come parallels from myth, fairy tale, religion and art, which he called amplification, showing what this image has meant to many people over time. The parallels do not replace the dreamer's sense of the image; they widen it, and they are dropped if they do not ring true.

The persona

Jung saw certain figures return in the dreams of many people. The first is often the persona, the mask worn for the world: the role, its manner and its uniform. Dreams of clothes, uniforms, being wrongly dressed or naked in company often concern the persona, whether it fits, whether it has grown too tight, and whether the person behind it has been forgotten.

The shadow

The shadow is all that the dreamer has refused to be: qualities disowned, impulses denied, gifts left unlived. In dreams it usually appears as a figure of the dreamer's own sex, disliked, feared or despised, often dark, crude or inferior, sometimes in pursuit. Jung taught that the shadow is met by recognising it as one's own, not by fighting it, and that it holds much of value as well as much that is hard. The first step of the long work he called individuation is usually this meeting.

Anima and animus

Beyond the shadow stands the inner figure of the other sex: in a man's dreams the anima, a woman, and in a woman's the animus, a man. Jung saw the anima as the bearer of feeling, mood and relatedness, and the animus as the bearer of conviction, word and meaning, and held that each can lead the dreamer into the depths or lead them astray. He framed these figures by sex, as his time did; many later Jungians read them more freely, as the inner figure of whatever is most other to the dreamer.

Elder, mother, child and trickster

Other figures recur, which Jung called archetypes and held to be inherited patterns of image and feeling common to all people. The wise old man, or wise old woman, appears as a teacher, guide, healer or magician, often at a moment of need, bringing meaning. The great mother appears in both her faces, nourishing and devouring, as a mother, a goddess, a cave or the sea. The child appears as new life and the future, often vulnerable, sometimes divine. The trickster plays pranks and upsets plans, and in doing so loosens what was rigid.

The Self

At the centre of all, in Jung's teaching, stands the Self, the archetype of wholeness, at once the centre and the whole of the psyche, of which the conscious ego is only a part. Dreams show it in images of order and centre: a circle or a square, a mandala, a precious stone, a city laid out round a centre, a divine child, or a figure of great dignity. Such dreams are often remembered for a lifetime.

The series and the way

Jung held that no single dream should be read too confidently. Dreams are best read in series, each throwing light on the others, and a reading is trusted only if it rings true to the dreamer and later dreams bear it out. Over years, he taught, a series of dreams traces the path he called individuation, the slow becoming of a whole person: meeting the shadow, then the inner other, then the Self. His methods, active imagination above all, are best practised with a guide when they stir much.