Jung In A Week by Ruth Snowden

Author:Ruth Snowden
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Jung In A Week
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2013-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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