Carl Jung Resources

Dream Interpretation Method at Carl Jung

Subject Level, Prospective Aspect,
Compensation, Amplification

• See also:
  - Dream Interpretation (email course)
  - Dream Interpretation: From primitives to Jung and Freud (email course)
  - Methods of Exploration of the Unconscious

Jung was the eminent student of Freud and, for a while, a tireless fighter of the Freudian cause. He was influenced by Freud's attitude towards the delicate problem of dream interpretation. Later on, Jung develops his own theory which includes a few basic elements: subject level, prospective aspect, oneiric compensation, method of amplification.

It is known that Freud interprets 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 X 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 biologic 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.

Freud's dream is retrospective; that is it refers mainly to past events, situated in the person's childhood (psychological trauma, sexual fixations). Jung's dream is prospective; it represents a kind of map of dreamer's future evolution. Talking about infantile complexes, Jung states, in accordance to his orientation, that complexes are not of importance per se, 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 hypertrophied psychological tendency. Dream analysis should aim the uncovering of its compensation's nature. In a certain 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 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, developed by Freud, 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 (see section on symbols). 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.

One must notice that these essential completions to the theory of dream interpretation should not be taken over easily. Jung states repeatedly that dreams ought to be interpreted at first by Freud's method. Only exceptional cases demand the use of his method.

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© Carl Jung Resources, 2008