Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Jung: Analytical
Psychology
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Companies, 2009scious and that their latent meaning is expressed in symbolic form. However, he ob-
jected to Freud’s notion that nearly all dreams are wish fulfillments and that most
dream symbols represent sexual urges. Jung (1964) believed that people used sym-
bols to represent a variety of concepts—not merely sexual ones—to try to compre-
hend the “innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding” (p. 21).
Dreams are our unconscious and spontaneous attempt to know the unknowable, to
comprehend a reality that can only be expressed symbolically.
The purpose of Jungian dream interpretation is to uncover elements from
the personal and collective unconscious and to integrate them into consciousness
in order to facilitate the process of self-realization. The Jungian therapist must
realize that dreams are often compensatory; that is, feelings and attitudes not
expressed during waking life will find an outlet through the dream process. Jung
believed that the natural condition of humans is to move toward completion or
self-realization. Thus, if a person’s conscious life is incomplete in a certain area,
then that person’s unconscious self will strive to complete that condition through
the dream process. For example, if the anima in a man receives no conscious devel-
opment, she will express herself through dreams filled with self-realization motifs,
thus balancing the man’s masculine side with his feminine disposition (Jung,
1916/1960).
Jung felt that certain dreams offered proof for the existence of the collective
unconscious. These dreams included big dreams,which have special meaning for all
people; typical dreams,which are common to most people; and earliest dreams re-
membered.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections,Jung (1961) wrote about a big dream he
had while traveling to the United States with Freud in 1909. In this dream—briefly
mentioned in our biographical sketch of Jung—Jung was living in the upper floor of
a two-story house. This floor had an inhabited atmosphere, although its furnishings
were somewhat old. In the dream, Jung realized that he did not know what the
ground floor was like, so he decided to explore it. After descending the stairs, he no-
ticed that all the furnishings were medieval and dated to the 15th or 16th century.
While exploring this floor, he discovered a stone stairway that led down into a cel-
lar. “Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked
exceedingly ancient.... As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from
Roman times” (Jung, 1961, p. 159). While exploring the floor of this cellar, Jung no-
ticed a ring on one of the stone slabs. When he lifted it, he saw another narrow stair-
way leading to an ancient cave. There, he saw broken pottery, scattered animal bones,
and two very old human skulls. In his own words, he had “discovered the world of
the primitive man within myself—a world which can scarcely be reached or illumi-
nated by consciousness” (Jung, 1961, p. 160).
Jung later accepted this dream as evidence for different levels of the psyche.
The upper floor had an inhabited atmosphere and represented consciousness, the top
layer of the psyche. The ground floor was the first layer of the unconscious—old but
not as alien or ancient as the Roman artifacts in the cellar, which symbolized a
deeper layer of the personal unconscious. In the cave, Jung discovered two human
skulls—the ones for which Freud insisted Jung harbored death wishes. Jung, how-
ever, saw these ancient human skulls as representing the depths of his collective un-
conscious.
Chapter 4 Jung: Analytical Psychology 125