Jung and Analytical Psychology

Carl Gustav lung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland -Ain 1875. His concept of "the collective unconscious" may be said to have cast new light on how the world works, and on how the humans in it live and move. Jung was both a friend and follower of Freud, and from 1907 became a devotee of his psychoanalytical theories and a member of a psychoanalytical society created bv Freud and his followers.

While Freud explained psychological symptoms mainly in terms of repressed infantile sexuality, Jung reached out rather more optimistically, as much forward as backward, into the lives of his clients. Jung eventually rejected Freud's idea that sexual experiences during infancy are the principal cause of neurotic behavior in adults. He believed that Freud overemphasized the role of sexual drive lie developed an alternative theory of the libido, arguing that the will to live was stronger than the sexual drive. Jung also emphasized analysis of current problems, rather than childhood conflicts, in the treatment of adults. In 1912, he resigned from Freud's society and founded his own school of psychology in Zurich.

Jung believed in psychological growth, or "individuation," powered by an innate drive to wholeness. Within this context, neuroses have a positive aim and constructive elements that represent attempts at growth, so it is as vital to elucidate their meaning and lessons as to know their origins.

He considered that at each stage of our lives we progress to deal with different aspects of our development, and that in later years cultural and spiritual needs become paramount.

He classified personalities into two types - introvert and extrovert - and developed a unique theory of the unconscious mind, in which he argued that there were both personal, or individual, and inherited or collected elements.

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By Robin Brain

Dream Theories from Past to Present

People have always been interested in dreams, in particular, in their meaning and in what causes them. A big proof of this interest is the fact that even scientists have a discipline for dream research called oneirology. But while oneirology has been able to answer a lot of questions about dreams and dreaming, the field has failed to describe exactly what dreams mean.

Oneirology, however, is a fairly new field describing man’s interest in dreams. Long before oneirology was born, there was oneiromancy, which is a form of divination by the analysis and interpretation of dreams.Oneiromancy has a long history, dating back to about 3000 to 4000 years before Christ and was practiced by ancient cultures, specifically by the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Babylonians. This long history of dream interpretation just proves man’s great interest in dream meanings.

Oneiromancy, however, is kind of vague, with each ancient culture offering different variations in dream interpretation. And aside from the dream meanings advocated by our ancestors, some great psychoanalysts have also offered their own theories in dream meaning. Further, many modern psychologists want to combine oneiromancy and oneirology, coming up with their own versions of dream theories.

With the long history of oneiromancy, one can expect to find different explanations about dream meanings. In this article, we present to you a few of the well-known theories on dream meanings. Among them are:

· The ancient dream theories

· Dream Theory of Sigmund Freud

· Dream Theory of Carl Jung

·Modern Dream Theory of Calvin Hall

The Ancient Dream Theories

Our ancestors have different beliefs on what dreams really mean. For the Greeks and the Romans, dreams are messages from the gods. As such, these people would often bring dream interpreters in battles to assist their military leaders.

In the Bible, one can also find a lot of accounts about dreams and their meanings. This just shows that Hebrews, as well as Egyptians, also believe in dreams. For the Egyptians, a dreamer is a blessed person while a dream interpreter is a gifted person. For Jews, dreams are often seen as prophetic.

In Chinese, Native American and ancient Mexican cultures, dreams are interpreted in another distinct way. For these people, dreams belong to another dimension or another world, and that a person’s soul goes out of his body while he is dreaming.

Dream Meaning According to Freud

According to Sigmund Freud, author of the book ‘Interpretation of Dreams’, dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious”. In his book, he described dreams as something that represents wishes that are repressed since childhood. These wishes are ever present in the unconscious but are not allowed into the conscious mind because, among other things, of their sexual nature.

According to Freud, dreams are highly symbolic because the unconscious tries to hide the wishes from the conscious mind. Thus, the wishes are disguised in either of the following methods:

· Condensation – where a dream object could stand for different things.

· Displacement – where the significance of the dream object is less than that of the disguised object.

· Representation – where a thought is translated into visual images.

· Symbolization – where an event or personality is replaced by a symbol.

Dream Meaning According to Jung

Carl Jung is once a follower of Freud but disagreed with him in some aspects of interpreting dreams. According to Jung, dreams are a way of the unconscious to communicate with the conscious mind. Jung also believed that archetypes in dreams represents the same things for all people and that these archetypes belongs to a “collective unconscious”.

Dream Meaning According to Calvin Hall

According to Calvin Hall, dreaming is a cognitive process. Unlike the theories of Jung and Freud that suggests that dream meanings can be discovered through the dream objects, Hall’s theory suggests that dream objects are but visual representations of personal conceptions. Thus, Hall claims that there is no general or symbolic meaning in dream images.

Which of Them Is True?

Different dream theories explain dream meanings differently. Sadly, there is no way for us to say which theory is the truth. Theories in dream interpretation are hardly based on scientific research, thus making them hard scrutinize. But whichever of them is the truth, all these theories tell us that dreams have meaning and must not be simply disregarded.

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The Interpretation of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams is a book by Sigmund Freud, the first edition of which was first published in German in November 1899 as Die Traumdeutung (though post-dated as 1900 by the publisher). The publication inaugurated the theory of Freudian dream analysis, which Jung referred to as the "royal road to the soul" and the unconscious, but Freud called the subconscious.

At the beginning of Chapter One, Freud describes his work thus:

In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state. Further, I shall endeavour to elucidate the processes which underlie the strangeness and obscurity of dreams, and to deduce from these processes the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or co-operation is responsible for our dreams.

The book introduces the Ego, and describes Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. Dreams, in Freud's view, were all forms of "wish-fulfillment" — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a conflict of some sort, whether something recent or something from the recessess of the past (later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud would discuss dreams which did not appear to be wish-fulfillment). However, because the information in the unconscious is in an unruly and often disturbing form, a "censor" in the preconscious will not allow it to pass unaltered into the conscious. During dreams, the preconscious is more lax in this duty than in waking hours, betation if they are to inform on the structures of the unconscious.

Freud makes his argument by first reviewing previous scientific work on dream analysis, which he finds interesting but inadequate. He then describes a number of dreams which illustrate his theory. Many of his most important dreams are his own — his method is inaugurated with an analysis of his dream "Irma's injection" — but many also come from patient case studies. Much of Freud's sources for analysis are in literature, and the book is itself as much a self-conscious attempt at literary analysis as it is a psychological study. Freud here also first discusses what would later become the theory of the Oedipus complex.

The initial print run of the book was very low — it took many years to sell out the first 600 copies. Freud revised the book at least eight times, and in the third edition added an extensive section which treated dream symbolism very literally, following the influence of Wilhelm Stekel. Later psychoanalysts have expressed frustration with this section, as it encouraged the notion that dream interpretation was a straightforward hunt for symbols of sex, penises, etc. (Example: "Steep inclines, ladders and stairs, and going up or down them, are symbolic representations of the sexual act.") These approaches have been largely abandoned in favor of more comprehensive methods.

Widely considered to be his most important contribution to psychology, Freud said of this work, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dream Interpretation and Sigmund Freud

In the early part of the 19th century, dream interpretation had fallen out of fashion, and almost no one practiced this art seriously. In the early part of the century, dreams were thought to have no meaning at all, and to be simply the result of a heavy meal before bedtime, noises heard in the night and other trivial causes.

By the latter part of the 19th century, however, Sigmund Freud would revolutionize the world of dreams and dream interpretation with his radical new ideas incorporating dreams and deep seated childhood fears.

Born in 1865, Sigmund Freud revolutionized the world of psychiatry and dream interpretation with his seminal work “The Interpretation of Dreams”. Freud started to analyze the dreams of his patients, and he used this dream analysis to diagnose and treat their psychiatric ills.

Freud also studied dreams as a way to understand certain aspects of the personality, especially those aspects that lead to psychological problems and disorders. Freud believed that nothing human beings did happened by chance, and that every action, no matter how small or seemingly trivial, was at some level motivated by the unconscious mind.

Of course in order for a civilized, modern society to function, certain primal needs and desires must be repressed, and Freud’s theory was that these repressed urges and desires were released by the unconscious during dream sleep.

Doctor Freud saw dreams as a direct connection to the unconscious mind, and he studied that connection through the interpretation of symbolic objects found in dreams. The theory was that with the conscious mind acts as a guard on the unconscious, preventing certain repressed feelings from coming to the surface. During sleep, however, this conscious guard is absent, and the subconscious mind is free to run wild and express its most hidden desires.

Freud was especially interested in the sexual content of dreams, and he often saw ordinary objects in dreams as representations of sexual desire. To Freud, every long, slender item encountered in a dream, from a knife to a flagpole, was a phallic image, while any receptacle such as a bowl or vase, represented the female genitalia.

Freud believed in five stages of personality, and he saw dreams as manifestations of desired stemming from each of these five stages. To Freud, personality formation consisted of:

Stage One – Oral/Dependency

Freud’s theory was that any needs not satisfied during the oral/dependency stage would cause the person to go through life trying to meet them. Thus, to Freud, habits such as overeating, drinking to much and smoking were all oral fixations. People suffering from these oral fixations often dreamed about their unmet needs and desires.