CARL JUNG THEORY- DREAMS AS DIRECT MENTAL EXPRESSIONS

Carl Jung, a psychoanalyst based in Zurich, Switzerland, was a friend and follower of Freud but soon developed his own ideas about how dreams are formed. Carl Jung did not believe that dreams were meant to be secretive, nor did he believe that dream formation was driven by repressed and conscious longings, such as aggressive and sexual instincts. He theorized that dreams were actually direct expressions of the mind itself. Similarly, Carl Jung saw dreams as having the same structure as a story or play. Jung believed that everyone shares a collective unconscious, which led him to believe that every dream symbol is stable across all cultures. For example, if you dream of a hero, it symbolizes your quest for personal power, efficacy, or identity. Dreams, he thought, expressed an individual’s unconscious state through a language of symbols and metaphors, which he called Archetypes. Carl Jung's four most common archetypes include the anima/animus, the shadow, the self, and the persona. The anima is a feminine image in the male psyche, and the animus is a male image in the female psyche. The shadow is described as composing repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings. The self is your true self, and the persona is described as enabling an individual to interrelate with the surrounding environment by reflecting the role in life that the individual is playing. Carl Jung believed that dreams served two functions: to compensate for imbalances in the dreamers’ psyche, and to provide prospective images of the future, which allowed the dreamer to anticipate future events.  

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