"The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it." Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Carl Jung, was a student and protege of Sigmund Freud. For the first part of his career, Jung assisted Freud with his development of dream interpretation and the technique of "free association". Later, Jung broke away from Freud's thinking and developed his own system of beliefs about dreams and their relevence to the dreamer.
Sigmund Freud is known for interpreting dreams on the object level; that is, according to the relationship between the dreamer, and the persons or situations in his environment. Jung introduces the subject level. What is the subjective level? The fact that the dream reveals in a symbolic way expressions of individual psychological life or of his internal transformations. This way, the dream becomes an indicator of those changes that sometimes point out the development of the individuation process.
So, if a man dreams of his mother, the mother is not an evocation of the real mother, but of his anima, that is his emotional feminine side. The mother can also be a suggestion to what is fundamentally biological in the human nature or to the ideas and concepts familiar to the individual that represent his inherited background, his homeland in a cultural way.
For Freud, the dream is retrospective (it refers mainly to past events), situated in the person's childhood ( eg.psychological trauma, sexual fixations). By contrast,Jung's dream is prospective; it represents a kind of map of dreamer's future evolution. For Freud, dreams are the psyches way of talking about infantile complexes (or unresolved problems), Jung states, in accordance to his orientation, that complexes are not of importance, but what the unconscious does with them. This way, the complexes become raw material for dreams, the language through which the dream (unconscious) expresses itself.
For Jung the concept of "compensation" includes another powerful idea: the dream is an attempt to counterbalance a divided psychological tendency. Dream analysis should aim the uncovering of its compensation's nature. For example, in one clinical situation, as a result of a dream analysis, Jung had to explain to his patient that she must resign her too rationalist attitude (as a consequence of her animus or hidden male inflation). This way the dream becomes a message of the unconscious that indicate several disastrous deficiencies in the individual (or society) existential orientation.
Finally, Jung adds to the free association method, the method of "amplification". He affirms that there are elements of the dream to which the dreamer cannot provide personal associations. These are the symbols alive in meaning in a person's life. In this case, the analyst should intervene with his knowledge and complete the dreamer's gaps. The associative material comes from different cultural directions: mythology, religion, alchemy, folklore.
It is noted that these essential completions to the theory of dream interpretation should not be considered without first considering the work of Freud. Jung states repeatedly that dreams ought to be interpreted at first by Freud's method. Only exceptional cases demand the use of his method. Since that time, other theorists and schools of psychology have developed other uses of dreams in treatment.
Peace,
Colleen
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