Jung: What dreams show us is

Jung: Dreams show us the unvarnished truth of nature

Freud's weakness, in the view of many scholars, was his obsession with sexual connotations, which greatly weakened the power of his theory. The next master of dream interpretation after Freud was Jung.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 ~ 1961), a famous Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst, has been highly praised in the world psychology community, and is one of the ancestors of modern psychology. His books include Psychology of Unconscious Processes, Psychological Types, Analytical Psychology and Interpretation of Dreams, and Memory, Dream, and Thinking. He was born on 26 July 1875 in the Canton of Thurgau, Switzerland. In 1902, Jung received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Zurich, where he became a lecturer in psychiatry in 1905. He quit to start his own practice. In 1911 he was elected the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. After his disagreement with Freud, he quit the International Psychoanalytic Society and created his own analytical psychology. He died in 1961.

Jung interpreted tens of thousands of dreams and had a very deep understanding of dreams, but his view was different from Freud's, he did not believe that dreams were merely to fulfill wishes, nor did he think that dreams were disguised. Jung believed that 'dreams are the spontaneous and undistorted product of the unconscious.' To Freud, a dream is like a sly rascal, making obscenities. For Jung, the dream seems to be a poet who tells the truth about the soul in vivid and vivid language. The poetical language used in such dreams is symbolic. Symbols are not for camouflage, but for clearer expression. This is just as when we describe a novel thing to others, in order to make it clear, we need to use metaphors to illustrate it.

The basic purpose of dreams is not to satisfy desires in disguise, but to restore mental balance. Jung called it the compensation of dreams. He believed that if a person's personality developed unevenly, excessively developing one aspect of himself and suppressing other aspects of himself, the dream would remind him of this suppressed side. For example, when a person attaches too much importance to his strong, brave temperament, and does not admit that he also has warmth, or even a weak side, he may dream that he is a timid little girl.

Jung also believed that dreams reveal a neglected and repressed side of the dreamer's own heart, and thus can often serve as a warning. Jung mentioned this example:

A lady, usually headstrong, stubborn and extreme, like to argue. She had a dream: 'I go to social gatherings. The hostess welcomed, 'I'm so glad you've come, all your friends are here waiting for you.' Then the hostess led me to the door and opened it for me. I went in and there was the cattle pen.'

As can be seen from this dream, the other side of the dreamer's heart is modest, which reminds the lady that you are usually behaving like a stubborn bull.

Jung also had the idea that the events and emotions that humans experience over generations eventually leave traces on the psyche that can be passed on through heredity. For example, when one thinks of the sun, one thinks of greatness, kindness, and radiance, like a handsome man. When I think of the moon, I think of tenderness and beauty, like a young girl. This is because generations of people have seen the sun and the moon, and generations of people's feelings for the sun and the moon have been passed on to each person through heredity. When a modern man thinks of a wise man, it is easy to conjures up the image of an old man with white hair and a long beard, and it is unlikely to conjures up the image of a lively maiden, because in past generations the wisest men have been those who have experienced the vicissitudes of life.

Jung called this original trace of heredity an archetype. He said that the archetype itself is not a concrete image, but only a tendency, but the archetype can emerge through an image. In dreams there are sometimes strange scenes and images which cannot be explained by the experience of the dreamer's own life, and these are the images which represent the archetype.

A 10-year-old girl had a series of dreams with bizarre images and themes. She drew these dreams into a picture book, in which she drew these pictures:

An evil snake-like monster appears, it has horns, kills and eats other animals. But God came from all sides (there are four gods in the picture) and made all the animals regenerate;

Ascending to heaven, where pagans are dancing in celebration. To hell, the angels do good;

A group of small animals terrorized her, the small animals grew large, one of them ate her;

A little mouse is penetrated by worms, snakes, fish and people. A mouse becomes a man;

Looking at a drop of water through a microscope, she saw many trees in it;

A bad boy takes a piece of dirt, he throws it at passers-by little by little, and they all become bad people;

A drunken woman falls into the water and rises again as a new man;

Many people roll over the ants and are attacked by them. In fear, the little girl falls into the river;

There are deserts on the moon. She sinks to hell;

There's a shiny ball. When she touched it, it steamed up, and a man came out and killed her;

She herself is critically ill. Suddenly a bird sprang up in her belly and covered her;

Swarms of insects obscured the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the only star that was not covered fell upon her.

According to Jung, these dream ideas carry philosophical concepts. For example, each of these dreams has themes of death and resurrection, and this theme is also present in many religious thoughts, and it is global. The fourth and fifth dreams contain the idea of evolution, and the second dream reflects the idea of moral relativity. In general, this series of dreams considers a set of philosophical issues: death, resurrection, atonement, human birth and value relativity, reflecting the idea of 'life is like a dream' and the transformation of life and death.

So how could a 10-year-old girl know this? Why would you think of that? Jung believed that she understood because the thinking of her ancestors had been passed on to her through archetypes for generations. She had to think about it because she was faced with the problem that she might die. The dreaming girl, although not ill at the time, died soon after due to infection.

For Jung, archetypes were not fixed forms, but rather primitive souls that lurk in the deepest parts of our psyche - what Jung called the collective unconscious. This primitive man appears in many different images in dreams, he helps us think when we are in trouble, and he warns us when we are in danger. Because of his hundreds of thousands of generations of life experience, his wisdom and intuition far exceed the thoughts in our consciousness.

Jung believed that 'the primitive man in us' used dreams to show himself and express himself. If we can understand dreams, it is like knowing many 'primitive' friends, whose wisdom can give us great help.

Jung believed that not all dreams were of equal value, that some were trivial and unimportant, and that others - the dreams in which the archetypes were involved - were so powerful, so mysterious and sacred, so strange and strange, as if from another world, that they were important.

Jung believed that dreams are not the fulfillment of wishes, but a revelation, a prediction or prediction of the future, so we should pay attention to the wisdom of dreams.