Carl Jung’s Dream Theories

Jung believed that the human psyche was divided in two parts—the conscious and the unconscious mind.

According to Jung, the center of the human psyche should not be considered the person’s ego. Instead, the center is the Self, which contains more than the conscious content. The Self is the completion of the human psyche, after someone has developed all of his or her psychological functions.

The unconscious mind is divided in personal and collective distinctions. The personal part contains someone’s individual experiences, while the collective part has general content existent in all human beings. The collective part is represented in dreams by the archetypes, which are symbols that appear in everyone’s dreams, in all historical times and civilizations.

The main dream symbols that appear in everyone’s dreams according to Jung’s statements are:

1. The Persona—This is the image that the individual presents to the world, like a social mask. The persona would reflect the person’s social position, profession, and status quo.

2. The Shadow—This is the part of the human psyche that is not developed yet. The shadow contains positive and negative characteristics, depending on someone’s personal evolution.

3. The Animus or Anima—This is the image of the ideal type of man for a woman, or the ideal type of woman for a man. The animus, or anima, is an idol, but could represent a real person of the person’s environment.

Carl Jung concluded that each dreamer who decides to discover the content existent in his or her own psyche through the interpretation of dreams would make a trip to the Self.

Jung managed to prove to the world that our dreams follow a sequence, helping everyone evolve as they learn more about the content of their psyche. This is how people are transformed and start to accept other aspects of life, which they were not able to absorb before the dream analysis.

We have four psychological functions—thoughts, feelings, sensations, and intuition. The more developed of the functions in someone’s psyche will determine his or her psychological type.

In addition to the four functions, everyone has a certain attitude that will characterize them as extroverted or introverted. The extroverted psychological types will always agree with the general opinion about reality, while the introverted psychological types will always have their personal opinion, which will usually be totally different from the general consensus.

Continuing Jung’s research in the unknown region of the human psyche, I can verify that his theories are correct with the exception of his belief that the unconscious mind does not contain the negative aspects that he asserted. Instead, another part of the human psyche, the primitive side of the human conscience, concentrates all the negative characteristics of someone’s personality. Therefore, the part of Jung’s theory is absurd because the primitive side was not developed like the human part of our conscience and provokes all existent mental illnesses to the human side of our conscience.

Everyone can transform the negative and dangerous part of their psyche in a positive part of their human side by translating their dreams according to the scientific method, and following the directions of the wise unconscious mind that produces our dreams.