Carl Jung; His Theories On Archetypes, Dreams, and the Collective Unconscious
Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in Switzerland. He was somewhat younger than his colleague Sigmund Freud, but also became one of the most well known names in the field of psychoanalysis and the study of dreams. Freud and Jung are the two most important and well-known forefathers of these fields, and at one point were friends. Their friendship lasted during the years of 1907 to 1913, and was terminated in anger by Jung in 1913. Jung found Freud to be unbending in his ideas, and not open to Jung’s or anyone else’s ideas about dreams, and therefore found a conflict that could not be resolved. This may have had to do with Freud’s status as being older than Jung, and seeing Jung as a student or patient rather than an equal. This was frustrating for Jung, and he later moved in a different direction with dream analysis than Freud.
Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections was begun through dictation to a secretary at the age of 82. He reflected on forty-two of his dreams in this book, but he had written extensively throughout his life. His published works fill eighteen volumes in the Bollingen Series of Princeton University Press. Two of his books remain unpublished, the Black Book and the Red Book. Jung was also an avid dream journal keeper. He wrote down and drew his dreams every morning. He used himself as his most studied subject. He was very creative in this process and some thought he even had a “creative illness.”
According to James Matlock in his book Harper’s Encyclopedia Of Mystical And Paranormal Experience (1991), Jung considered dreams to be, “compensatory, to provide information about the self, achieve psychic equilibrium, and offer guidance.” He also believed that, “dreams had a deeper meaning, that they were involved in bringing spiritual direction to a person in a process of unfoldment or evolutionary growth,” according to Gary K. Yamamoto in his book Creative Dream Analysis (1988). Jung also coined the phrase collective unconscious. Yamamoto goes on to say, “Carl Jung thought that people were tied together through a common and vast intelligence called the ‘collective unconscious’… which is the storehouse of the total experience and knowledge of all mankind. Though this unlimited source of information seems to lie just beyond our ability to recognize and use it, it is actually providing constant guidance. Messages from the universal intelligence flow in a continuous stream, guiding each of us from moment to moment. Some people call this their conscience or say that they hear a ‘small voice’ inside their mind.”
Jung introduced the idea of archetypes as a psychic structure for the collective unconscious of humanity that was reflected in every individual. The term archetype was coined by Saint Augustine, meaning a genetic encoding or impression in the brain tissue. Archetypes are forms that have mass associations and certain emotions attached to them. In volume 18 of his Collected Works, Jung wrote: “The archetype is… an inherited tendency of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs—representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern.” He believed that the unconscious of any given individual contains inherited information that predated the individual’s existence and was a remnant of the species’ past. There is evidence that our bodies contain remnants of our ancient past, for instance, a fetus has gills in early stages of pregnancy, so Jung argued that the mind could also contain remnants of our ancient past, just as our bodies do. He encountered many references to ancient belief systems that the patient could not have known about in sessions.
Jung’s theory of personality development consisted of the idea that one is always moving toward maturity and completion and that life is a series of transformations toward that goal. Crisis leads to maturation as problems are overcome and assimilated. Archetypes appear in these crises, especially in dreams. The hero archetype could be a triumph over a problem if it appears in a dream. The shadow archetype is associated with the dark side of the personality, the primitive animal instincts within mankind. As children, we learn to ignore these impulses, but Jung believes that they are often the culprit at the root of negative situations. Guilt is present when these feelings arise, for the child has been taught to self-regulate these urges.
This shadow side shows up in dreams unrepressed and unchecked, and much can be learned from examination of these dreams. Jung believed that acceptance of these disowned and ignored layers of our personality is the beginning of the move toward maturation and self-understanding. The shadow usually shows up as a negative or unsavory character in the dream and could appear as the drug addict, pervert, criminal, Nazi, deformed or sinister presence that might remain unseen in the darkness.
Jung describes the archetypes of the soul as the animus and the anima. The animus is the masculine side of a woman’s personality and the anima is the feminine side of a man’s personality. He believed that by getting in touch with the animus or anima within oneself, relationships could be less volatile and difficult. When we encounter strong sexual opposites in a dream, we are receiving information about our animus or anima. Fear of our own embodiment of the opposite sex is usually at the root of these types of dream. As these animus and anima figures transform in dreams, so do our personalities in waking life. An archetype acts like a magnet, attracting relevant experiences. After enough of these experiences have clustered around an archetype, it breaks through into consciousness. After this it becomes more developed and refined.
Many Jungians capitalize the word Self because Jung believed that Self is the final product of life. This is a larger transpersonal self—God. When one is in touch with the archetype of Self, it would feel as if some sort of divine force was present, a larger force directing everything, and some greater plan being carried out. As the elements of the personality are discovered and worked with to gain maturation, the transcendent function is in operation. This is the capacity to bring opposites together, thus resulting in the actualizing of the archetype Self.
Jung was an artist. He drew what he saw in his dreams, mandalas particularly. These images are associated with the Self archetype. A mandala is a symmetrical, balanced, and centered image, often circular. Mandala is a Sanskrit word for magic circle. Mandalas were a theme in Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works, Volume 12). He started receiving his own mandalas after working with the young man who is the main subject of this material. The young man received hundreds of mandalas in dreams, each one successively more complicated than the previous one. Jung was inspired by this so mandalas appeared in his dreams as well. The concept of “fourness” was a re-occurring theme for Jung, not only in himself but also in others. He knew that four was a sacred number in some cultures. It appeared often in his mandalas. Jung believed that dreams were a rich source of creative energy.
Jung believed that the psyche is in a compensation and balancing process all the time, just like our physical bodies. Our physical bodies perspire or shiver, depending on what balance needs to be done in temperature adjustment. Our psyche does the same. The goal of life is that all the components of the personality must become balanced.
Jung said that dreams are dramas on one’s interior stage. These have a series of steps. First is the opening scene introducing the setting, characters, and initial situation of the main character. Second is the development of the plot, third is the emergence of a major conflict, and fourth is the response to the conflict by the main character or another character. Some dreams are too short or fragmented to be classified in these terms. These are still attempts at problem solving in the personal structure. The ending of the dream shows the possibilities for the dreamer in waking life to solve similar problems.
Jung was puzzled by paranormal dreams. He could not classify them the way normal dreams could be, but the mystery did lead him to expound on his principle of synchronicity. This concept is that events occur together in time but are not linked through cause and effect connections. For instance, a clock might stop at the moment of its owner’s death, but these are purely synchronistic and unrelated events. Jung concluded that perhaps there is some sort of order in the universe, where a manifestation appears psychically while the related manifestation in physical reality happens at the same time.
Jung did not try to establish a particular school of thought or acquire disciples, so his concepts were not well known outside of his home country, Switzerland. While Freud created an international society around his work, Jung remained obscure in public view. He is also not as good a writer as Freud, so his texts did not gather the kind of attention Freud’s did. Jung is labeled a mystic by some intellectuals, and at the same time, his viewpoint of the personality is more optimistic and positive than Freud’s.
Jung differed from Freud in many ways, particularly in the area of seeing dreams as something that actually happened to the dreamer rather than wish fulfillment as Freud endorses. Freud did not encourage his patients to keep dream journals, and Jung did. Freud did not believe the dreaming mind has reasoning faculties. Jung did, and in fact, he believed that the dreaming mind contained abilities that the conscious mind would never have. Freud looked at dreams as infantile fantasies, while Jung looked at them as arenas for working out problems as life progressed for the individual.
Most dream analysts and psychology practitioners use the Jungian methods for analyzing dreams rather than the Freudian methods. In a way, Jung did surpass his predecessor and colleague because his methods have lasted over time while Freud’s deductions and methods have not.
To learn more about Carl Jung, Jungian archetypes (also called personality archetypes) and the theory behind Jungian dream interpretation, refer to Carl Gustav Jung’s works exploring dream interpretation, memory, life and spirituality. These include his Collected Works and Memories, Dreams, Reflections.