Freud and Jung: two ways of reading a dream

Freud: a dream as a door to the depths

In 1900 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams and treated the dream as a serious subject of study. He held that a dream has two layers: the story you remember on waking is the manifest content, and the real meaning behind it is the latent content. The latent content is mostly a wish or worry that cannot be admitted by day, and only after some "dream-work" does it take the shape of the manifest dream.

That work has a few usual tricks: condensation, pressing several people or events into one picture; displacement, shifting a strong feeling onto something inconspicuous; symbolisation, using one thing to stand for what cannot be said; and a tidying-up just before waking that makes the scraps read like a story.

What to borrow from Freud

The most useful thing is the method of association: do not ask directly what a thing stands for, ask "when you mention it, what is the first thing that comes to mind?" The same picture brings different associations to different people, and only your own carry weight.

There is also a useful reminder: the surface of a dream is not necessarily the point. What deserves attention is often the inconspicuous detail and the feeling that is hard to name.

What to put down is the conclusion that "every dream is the fulfilment of a wish". Later researchers mostly no longer think so. A dream holds wishes, but also worries, memories and plain stray thoughts.

An example: reading one dream by association

Suppose someone dreams of being back in a school classroom, about to sit an exam in a subject never studied. A Freudian reading follows the associations: whom does this classroom bring to mind? What matter in your present life does "a subject never studied" call up? Perhaps lately there is something at work that nobody taught you and yet you are to hand it in; the classroom is a borrowed scene and "not ready" is the true word.

A Jungian reading asks something else: do you always put on a look of confidence by day? The dream hands you the side that says "I don't know, I'm afraid of looking foolish", making up for what you will not admit by day.

The two readings do not clash. One often asks about the cause underneath, the other what the dream is making up for. Asking both questions is steadier than using only one.

Jung: a dream as another voice of the inner life

Jung began as a follower of Freud and later went his own way. He held that a dream does not hide something but speaks directly in pictures, a kind of self-regulation of the psyche. If by day a person leans too far to one side, the dream supplies the other. This is called compensation.

He also proposed that deep in the mind there are image patterns shared by all humanity, called archetypes, such as the shadow (the side we do not want to admit), the wise old man, the mother, the child, and they often appear in dreams as figures or scenes.

A few of Jung's common terms

In writing about Jung you meet a few terms. The persona is the face we wear outside, such as "the reliable colleague" or "the sensible child". The shadow is the side we do not want to admit and yet that is ours, often appearing in dreams as an unpleasant or frightening figure. The anima and animus are the feminine image in a man's mind and the masculine image in a woman's, which for Jung shape how we see close relationships. The Self is the centre of the whole psyche, towards which Jung thought a life slowly moves.

These terms need not be memorised. In reading your own dreams, asking about the shadow is already useful: in what way am I actually like the person I disliked or feared in the dream? Is there something I do not allow myself by day?

Jung also proposed "active imagination": awake, return to a picture from the dream, let it go on developing and speak with the figures in it. It is a safe exercise, and if it feels distressing, you can simply stop.

What to borrow from Jung

Jung was against looking things up in a "dream dictionary". The same symbol, he said, means different things to different people and must be read within the dreamer's life. His method of "amplification" is to keep asking about one picture: what does it bring to mind? What is it like in stories and legends? If it were a part of you, what would it want to say?

Another useful thread is the series of dreams: if one dream is unclear, put several side by side and the theme often surfaces.

What is also to be put down is treating archetypes as standard answers to match against. They are keys that open the imagination, not verdicts.

After Freud: how modern psychology uses dreams

After Freud, people who studied dreams did a good deal of plainer work. Hall and Van de Castle collected thousands of dream reports and used statistics to see what people really dream of, finding that the figures, settings and feelings in dreams coincide strongly with what people care about awake. It gave much evidence for "a dream is a continuation of the day".

In counselling, dream work often uses the cognitive-experiential method proposed by Clara Hill, in three steps: exploration, in which you spell out the dream's pictures and feelings and associate to them; insight, in which you set the dream beside your present life and find what it is saying; and action, in which you take away one small thing you can do. The steps do not assume that a dream must hide a secret; they use the dream to get to know oneself.

Our dream reading follows the same line: she first asks you to tell the dream clearly, then looks with you at what is underneath, and ends on one small thing you can do in the next few days.