Carl Jung was a follower of Freud who broke away from his mentor and developed a school of psychology that encouraged growth and individuation through the exploration of the unconscious. This famed Swiss psychiatrist gave us many important insights into dreams.
One of the most important contributions Jung made to dream work was to proclaim that every interpretation is a hypothesis. In Jung we have an expert who was wise enough to remain humble and to reject, at least in theory, the role of the infallible sorcerer, guru, or all-authoritative doctor. True, some of Jung's followers have tried to make him a guru. True, Jung did not always do what he could to discourage his followers from falling into a cult-like admiration of him and his work, but then, he was only human.
Jung went beyond his predecessors, too, in teaching not only his students but his patients how to interpret their own dreams. While he recognized the enormous difficulties in analyzing one's own dreams and encouraged dreamers to obtain "qualified assistance," he did instruct his more advanced clients in eliciting and examining their associations and in relating this material to the universal psychological themes found in religion and myth that Jung thought to be so important to the full interpretation of a dream.
Jung rebelled against Freud's insistence that all dreams are disguised expressions of the fulfillment of a repressed infantile wish, and he pointed to the way many dreams compensate for the one-sided or too-narrow attitudes of consciousness. Jung expanded the concept of the function of dreams to include not only compensation but confirmation or fine tuning of conscious perceptions, introduction into new areas of experience, problem-solving, and clarification of dynamics not understood in consciousness. He encouraged active participation in dream work by saying that, while conscious understanding of the meaning of a dream is not always necessary to reap some benefit, such understanding greatly enhances the impact of the dream.
Jung argued against Freud's position that the images in dreams result from an effort by the dreamer's unconscious "censor" to disguise the hidden wish that instigated the dream. Jung saw dream images as revealing—rather than concealing—the actual situation in the unconscious. Because of this, he paid special attention to the manifest dream images, saying that we have no right to assume that a tortoise in a dream is a disguise for something else. He thus exhorted his students to explore a particular image and discover why the dreamer used that and not another image. Instead of asking the dreamer to "free-associate" to the image—a practice that usually leads to a long chain of tangential thoughts—Jung asked the dreamer to stay closer to the image and describe its historical and/or emotional context in the dream and in waking life.
Unfortunately, in practice Jung often omitted or short-circuited this phase of establishing the context of the image by intervening with his own associations and mythological and historical ''amplifications" of the image. He would often "explain" the meaning of an image to the dreamer, drawing upon his own reading of myths and symbols in alchemy, astrology, the history of religions, and mythology. Jung's practice violated his own dictum that "the only justifiable interpretations are those reached through a painstaking examination of the context. Even if one has great experience in these matters, one is again and again obliged, before each dream, to admit one's ignorance and, renouncing all preconceived ideas, to prepare for something entirely unexpected" ("On the Nature of Dreams," in Jung's Dreams, Princeton University Press, 1974, 73).
The danger of explaining the meaning of a dream to the dreamer based on your own acquaintance with the image is, of course, that your understanding may not only be faulty, but irrelevant to the dreamer's experience of the symbol. Such explanations can easily distract the dreamer from exploring his or her own sense of the image, and, as Medard Boss points out, they can "seduce the patient to take refuge from the personal and the concrete in something distant and alien which does not oblige the patient in any way to be responsible for the concrete ways of living his day-to-day life" (I Dreamt Last Night, M. Boss, New York: Gardner Press, 1977).
Jung was least careful in establishing the context of a dream's images when the dreamer offered few associations to an image. Jung took the lack of associations as permission to defer to mythological references and interpretations, because he assumed that the material was not of a personal but of a collective or transpersonal nature. Thus, when one of his patients dreamt of a tortoise and offered associations comparing it to a crocodile—a living relic of prehistoric animals—Jung made no further inquiries and, while later demonstrating his technique to a group of students, took off on a whirlwind tour of his own knowledge, opinions, associations, and interpretations. After describing the tortoise as cold-blooded, untrustworthy, living in an armored house, amphibious, apathetic, highly mythological, and mysterious, Jung interpreted the image (as he had earlier for the patient) as a symbol of the transcendent function that reconciles the opposites of the conscious and the unconscious in the dreamer (from Jung's Dream Analysis, Princeton University Press, 1984,644-648).
We will never know what the dreamer thought and felt about tortoises. What if Jung had followed his own advice and asked his patient to describe a tortoise? Would the dreamer have said, as did one of my clients, that tortoises are sweet, friendly little things that are very vulnerable when fate flips them on their backs? And that inside their tough shell they are very tender, sort of like her father? Or maybe Jung's dreamer would have described tortoises as did another client of mine, who dreamt of a tortoise and said they were mellow, relaxed little critters who live simply and without complications by carrying their houses on their backs. Jung's patient probably would have had his own surprising descriptions to offer—had he been asked.
You can see what pitfalls await the interpreter who thinks he or she can substitute his or her associations and "learned" descriptions for those of the dreamer. Clearly, my clients used tortoises in ways very different from each other and from Jung's interpretation. "Both the nature of the dream and its therapeutic message will emerge, contrary to the Jungian viewpoint, without any support from mythology or folklore, without any knowledge of primitive psychology or comparative religion, without any aid at all from psychology. In fact, no doctrine of the 'psyche' is required" (Boss 1977, 168). And while I have sometimes seen therapeutic benefit result from the discussion of myths and archetypal motifs in therapy, such discussions are most often intrusive, distracting, and even misleading in the context of dream exploration.
This brings us to Jung's attitudes towards men and women and thus to his formulations about how the male and female psyches work. His interpretations of dreams were highly influenced and often determined by the way he understood the psychological differences between the sexes. First, it will help to keep in mind that Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875 and died in 1961, a full decade before most Swiss women were granted the right to vote. In the canton of Inner Appenzell, women still did not have that right until 1990!) For his time and place, and in light of his difficult relationship with his mother, Jung's attitudes towards women are not surprising. But today it is important to reexamine his ideas and theories about the sexes, because they play a large part in how many Jungians handle dreams.
Jung subscribed to the Chinese view that the male principle, Yang, is "dry, active, fiery, [and] creative" (Jung 1984, 403), and that the female principle, Yin, is "cool, nocturnal, humid [and passive]." Jung felt that psychology has taught the West that there is indeed "an active and a passive aspect, a masculine principle which is generative and a female principle which is receptive" (404). In discussing the symbolism of the sun and the moon, Jung describes the sun as generative and dynamic, and the moon as "more a form into which one can pour one's contents. Hence the definitely female quality of the moon" (Jung 1984, 403).
In explaining the symbolic meaning of wives in one of his male patient's dreams, Jung said without qualification that "they are the emotions, for that is the way man usually becomes acquainted with woman" (13). Jung stated that he "always kept [this patient] away from emotion to let him see the facts." This is because Jung believed that such a "correct, sincerely right," thinking type of male patient "must first do away with emotions and look at the images [in a dream] in a very calm way" (14).
Why would Jung say such a thing? Because he believed that emotion in a male was not purposive, that it is "only useful when, through tremendous self-control, he can play his emotion when it is cold; then with that purposive element, he can play and perform... It is quite different with women; women must have emotions or they can't see anything. A woman weeps because she is bored, tired, angry, joyous, anything—but not because she is sad. Her emotions are always for a certain purpose, she can work with her emotions whether she admits it or not is another matter... A woman works through her emotions, with every gift, as a man works with his mind—there is always a purpose. While a woman's mind has the innocence and purposelessness of a natural product. That is why there are so many power devils among women, like Mme de Maintenon or Mme de Pompadour" (Jung 1984, 14).
Besides getting a look at Jung's rather rigid ideas about the nature of a male's emotions and a female's mind, we see here one of the many examples of Jung's cheap shots at the feminine sex that can be found throughout his writings, and which are in no way counterbalanced by his generally more indulgent and respectful comments about the male sex. Jung wrote that "My mother had a split mind, and from her I learned the natural mind of woman" (Jung 1984, 87), and "Woman, to a certain extent, is Nature and Nature is terrible, inconsistent and logical at the same time" (Jung, 88).
The work of Carl Jung is peppered with comments about controlling females whose masculine intellect is inherently inferior to their Eros-oriented femininity and, of course, to a man's mind. He seems indeed to have formed many of his theories about women from his difficult experiences with his own mother and often paints women as manipulative and illogical. Regarding the appropriate social roles of women, while Jung encouraged many to become Jungian analysts, we cannot ignore such statements as, "It is the idea that every respectable man holds, that the wife goes by herself, that the marriage will work itself out. The only thing that does not go by itself is business. With the wife the only thing that does not go by itself is marriage, for that is her business" (Jung 1984, 157).
I would encourage you to read any ten papers from Jung's collected works and see for yourself how he describes the differences between the male and female psyches. From my reading and years of analysis, l have come to the conclusion that (to paraphrase a friend) we should use Jung as a quarry, not as a fortress. The best that Jung has to offer us today will only be enhanced by a careful weeding-out of his time-and-place-bound prejudices.
Written by and Copyright 1989 by Gayle Delaney, Ph.D. Originally printed in New Realities Magazine May/June 1989