Jung

DREAM FUNCTIONING ACCORDING TO JUNG

A. The psyche in Jungian terms is the totality of personhood. It embraces all thoughts, feelings, attitudes and behaviors on conscious and unconscious levels. As opposed to developmental theories of personality, the Jungian model stresses the inhe rent but undifferentiated wholeness with which wo/man is born.

B. The psyche is as a sphere. It is composed of:

1) The collective unconscious

2) The personal unconscious

3) The consciousness

a) The ego functions as a delimitor, a window or as a focal point for the consciousness

C. The collective unconscious consists of imbedded deposits of world processes. Its existence is not dependent upon personal experiences. It holds a reservoir of primordial images which are prefigured by evolution. They are interwoven into sympa thetic neurological pathways. Archetypes are a portion of the collect tive unconscious.

D. Archetypes are universal prototypes or models upon which all psychic processes depend. Examples of archetypes are the anima, the animus, the persona, birth, rebirth, the wise old man, earth mother, natural objects: the moon, the sun, fire and rings.

E. The personal unconscious is a receptacle or storage mechanism for that which is not contained within the consciousness. It is the underside of the coin of consciousness: forgotten associations, unnoticed experiences, observations, moral questi onings, repressed and discarded thoughts, half-thoughts, seemingly irrelevant details and incongruities. It is at this level that the ego, as a part of consciousness, interfaces with the personal unconscious within the psyche.

F. Consciousness develops through sensing, thinking, feeling and intuition. (These are the building blocks of Myers Briggs Testing) These mental attitudes determine and pattern the orientation of the individual into types, those of introverts, ex troverts, sensing or intuitive, thinking or feeling types.

II INDIVIDUATION

A. The growth and development of the psyche is through individuation. It proceeds from simple to complex; from a state of undifferentiation to a state of wholeness. The process of individuation is most easily observed in dreams, fantasies, vision s, mandalas, creative acts and psychotherapy. Individuation is an inborn process.

1) Carl Jung said about mandalas, "Drawing mandalas expands one's thinking, exercises integrity, exposes unconscious traits, focuses attention and brings self-knowledge. It calms and relaxes the psyche."

One technique using mandalas is to take the significant elements or images from a dream and make a dream mandala. Spend time with this drawing and see how it relates to your waking life.

2) Renderings - Creative rendering techniques deal with the translation of the dream image rather than using techniques of interpretation and analysis. The focus is not that of a cognitive understanding of the dream. The focus is the expression and completion of the individual's feelings generated through the dream. Rendering techniques also provide a method of integrating the dream into physical reality. Dream rendering techniques usually are expressed graphically, poetically, musically, dram atically or physically.

3) Storytelling - Another method of individuation can be performed in a group setting. Have all the individuals tell a dream. When they have finished with their dream, have them pick one symbol or significant scene from their dream and draw it. Everyone within the group will do the same thing. When everybody has finished, the group will make a cohesive story from the composite dream drawings.

III DREAM INTERPRETATION

A. Jung believed that the most effective method for dream interpretation was the use of series correlation. This involves the analysis of dreams over time. Using an index card file or a computer printout of your dream symbols, select a number of dreams that have similar dream symbols. Relax and try to allow the images of the different dreams to merge together forming a larger dream. Let an image or fantasy emerge from the composite dreams. Try to determine what relationship, if any, there is between the dream image that was synthesized from the composite dream and see if there are any waking situations that might be related to this particular image. Write out a physical action that could be taken because of the information learned through us ing this technique.

B. Amplification is the process of gathering all available knowledge on a particular dream symbol from personal and impersonal associations. Knowledge may be gleaned from associations to folklore, historical references, literature, art, and mythol ogy. The object of amplification is to understand the significance of a particular symbol or expression.

The universality of the dream symbol is expressed by the collective unconscious.

1) Amplification is a Jungian technique which attempts to expand the individual's associations and understanding of a dream image. An image is chosen from the dream and the individual asks questions of the image. What is the shape of the image? What is the function of the image? What alterations does the image go through? What does the image do? What do you like and dislike about the image? What does the image remind you of? The individual writes down all of the associations that he can thi nk of concerning the image.

Example:Telephone Exchange

A central place for communications. A safe house where information can be exchanged. The exchange allows for quick and easy access to information....

a. Beyond amplification lie the techniques of objective and subjective interpretation.

1) At the objective level, the dream symbols may, in fact, correspond objectively to their living counterparts. Example: If you dream you have a flat tire, check the air in your tires. The dream can supply such objective information to the dream er.

2) If the dream has no apparent correspondence with objective reality, a subjective method of interpretation may be more suitable. This method is similar to the Gestalt approach, in which each aspect of the dream is an aspect of the dreamer in a c compensatory manner.

3) Jungian and Gestalt views are different because Jung viewed the dream as compensating for unbalanced aspects of the psyche.

IV BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Jung, C.G. Collected Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
• Jung, C.G. Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.
• Hall, C.S. & Nordby, V.J. A primer of Jungian Psychology. New York: Mentor, 1973.
• Seifer, M. NREM, Freud, Jung, REM, Myers, Steiner, Et al.: A paper on the interpretation of dreams. Kingston, RI, 1981.
• Wolman, B. Handbook of dreams: Research, theories and applications: New York: Van Nostrand, 1979.

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