Inner Work Notes

Category: Jung & the Unconscious

  • I Can’t Do This, and That Is Where It Starts

    Recovery language has the word surrender in it. Said out loud it sounds like taking your hands off. What actually happens at that point is not that.

    A part that insists it owns the whole

    There is a formulation that the ego has to die in front of the Self — the whole of you. The ego does not oblige. It stays alive in us the entire time. What is going on is that the part has shoved the whole aside and is insisting that it is the owner. Jung’s account of the process has this same passage in it.

    So the dying being described is not an instruction to get rid of yourself. It is the part climbing down out of the owner’s seat. What kind of seat that is I have written out separately in You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God.

    Settle it at step one and half of it is settled

    What is the first step of the recovery program? In the end it is denying yourself. Without denying yourself, nothing new begins. Ask which step matters most and the answer is step one. Someone who cannot get through step one gets nothing out of moving on to step two, and someone who settles it at step one alone has nearly half of the whole thing settled.

    Denying yourself is not an instruction to hate yourself. What is denied is not your existence — it is the judgment that you can solve this yourself.

    First counselling of his life, and already there

    There is a case of a man who had been using cannabis. It was the first counselling of his life and he had carried out step one before he walked in. What he had arrived at on his own was this: this drug has wrecked me, and I cannot cut it off. And if I cannot cut it off, my life comes apart. Then he went to the prosecutors and wrote out a confession, told his parents everything, confessed to his wife. He had never once been caught. He had worked out that if he could not stop he would die of it, so he settled his mind and came in prepared for prison, with no idea what sentence would land.

    A good man when he smoked

    Cannabis had been, by his own account, a genuine saviour. And he had used a great deal of it. At the beginning there was a flash of something, an ease it handed him. Repeat it long enough, though, and the eyes go loose. Anyone looking at him could see that he was not right. And he came apart in two: a very good man while he was smoking, and, when he was not, irritation and a raw, extreme sensitivity. At home nobody could work out why he was like that. Why a person cannot stop at the line he drew for himself is a separate question, and I have gone into it in Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller.

    I can’t. I am not able to.

    So he reaches it: I am someone who cannot solve this. And he goes down in front of other people. I can’t. I am not able to. That is the posture. And it is when a person goes down like that that a new start actually happens.

    Not turned over — decided to turn over

    The third step of the recovery program comes with a commentary, and that commentary begins from a fact about the addict: his will and his life had already been turned over, to the addiction. It describes the addiction driving that will and that life into extreme despair — and only then did they go looking for another way.

    The sentence that sits in that place is the third step itself. It does not say the will and the life were turned over. It says a decision was taken to turn them over — the step’s own words are “made a decision”. The commentary puts weight on exactly that — “it was not that someone decided for us; we decided.” It calls this the first decision he had made for himself since the addiction took hold, and adds that deciding requires action.

    The clause in front of the word God is not decoration either. It is not God flatly. It is God “as we came to understand him” — which is to say the content of that word is left with each person. The commentary is plain that nobody had to be religious to take this step, and that each person has the right to believe in God as he has come to understand him.

    And it may still be sitting in your hands

    So this step is not a matter of handing the thing to somebody else and walking away. The commentary says that even after you have said you turned it over, your will and your life may still be sitting in your own hands — and that you may find yourself angry that God permitted that to be so. It expects the questions that follow, and writes them down: “If I turn my life over, what on earth is going to happen? Will I become complete?”

    The word to listen for is surrender

    Further on, the passage restates the step without the decision clause: “We turned our will and our lives over completely to the care of a God greater than ourselves.” And then comes a line telling the reader where to put his attention — “listen to the word surrender here”. Then: the helpless despair, the kind that had looked past hope, begins to lift.

    The place where that lifting starts is the place where somebody goes down and says he cannot.

    Surrender is not taking your hands off. A man who has given up does not write out a confession and carry it to the prosecutor.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Small Wisdom Will Not Solve a Life

    Think of the ego as clay. If a human being is clay with breath blown into it, then the thing you call I is not the clay at all. It is the breath. The trouble starts when the clay begins announcing that it is the Self.

    This is not the old line about man being dust and nothing better, nor a verdict on your worth in the other direction. It is a question about occupancy — who is sitting in the seat where the breath belongs. What sort of seat that is, I have written about already, in You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God. What follows is what a life looks like once the clay has climbed up into it.

    Growing up is the moment the head comes down

    Becoming an adult is the ego meeting the Self. And in that meeting, the head comes down. Before God, before life, before nature, the mind turns humble. Reaching that stage of humility is what being grown up is.

    Ignore the current and anger is what is left

    Whoever cannot lower the head goes the opposite way. There are currents running through a life that we know nothing about, enormous currents, and this person ignores them. I get married when I want to get married. I eat when I want to eat. I take a shit when I want to. And then it does not go the way I wanted it, and the anger arrives. A great many grown adults live at exactly this address, carrying anger and hatred and depression around with them.

    You can read off what the ego is from that. The ego is the part that thinks it is grander than God. Which leaves it no reason to look into the Self. It does not ask, it does not try to make contact, it goes on living by its own lights and its own preferences.

    “That is what the law is”

    The ego runs on its own method. I will try living this way. I will try living that way. Religious life is no exception — do it like this and your faith is good, no, do it like that and your faith is good. Track any of it back and the ego has been driving the whole time.

    There are people who live with real heat, hard and devoted, religious life included. And a person living like that is out of contact with the Self inside him. Out of contact with the Self means not connected to his own inner wisdom. Something moves into the empty place: the ego’s concept of the thing. Live this way and you are a right person, live this way and you are a holy person. That is what the law is. Keep what the world taught you and you will shine, you will be impressive, you will be holy.

    It looks like something, for a while

    Handling reality is the ego’s actual job, so a life run on the ego’s method does look plausible for a stretch. It looks like something is being built. Ultimately it does not hold. You keep going over.

    It relapses, it falls, it repeats. You did not want to live like this and the same situation keeps turning up (Your Life Script: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Ending). You tried to get better. You tried to have better faith, tried to live a holy life, and again it did not take. You can push at that pitch and the freedom inside you never shows up. Real freedom.

    Small wisdom and big wisdom

    The first admission in addiction recovery is a confession — I was powerless over the addiction, and there was nothing I could do about it. Read that as a statement about supply: the ego’s resources have run out.

    Sooner or later you collide with your own life. I tried it with my wisdom and the thing will not come untangled. The weariness of living, the matters that will not resolve — human wisdom cannot get them open. Human thinking is fragmentary to begin with, and extremely narrow. What we manage to assemble inside that narrowness, thrashing about trying to survive, is small wisdom. A life gets solved with big wisdom. Small wisdom will not solve a life. Big wisdom is the wisdom the true Self tells you.

    Somebody hits you once

    So what does small wisdom actually look like, close up? It is a calculation of profit and loss.

    Scripture is paradoxical, and the thing it is paradoxical against is human thinking. A person has worked out that doing it this way will pay, this way will be good for me — and scripture mostly says the reverse. No: do it the other way, and that is where the benefit is. The instructions it hands back are of that kind — sacrifice, give, forgive.

    In human terms, forgiving is a loss. Somebody hits you once, across the face. You are told to forgive. Forgive and you do not get to hit back, so this is a loss, and you are being told to take it anyway. And then you are told the forgiving is to your benefit. On human arithmetic that is very hard to accept.

    The road that helps you gets scored as a loss

    Which is why, nearly every time, the methods we think will benefit us are the ones that bring us harm.

    It runs the same way from the other side. Somebody lays out the road for you — it would do you good, it would make you happier — and you do not take it. There is one reason. You think you will lose by it. The flesh’s way of thinking registers that loss. It is not that the benefit was hidden from you. The loss calculation answers first, before anything else gets a turn.

    Most people scrabble along on the ego for the whole distance and die that way, never having tasted real freedom or real truth, having tried hard after their own fashion, and then finished. And then there are people who got addicted, who are carrying an injury, who went looking for a way to fix it and ran into the truth on the way. It hurt too much to leave alone. So they looked deeper, and deeper again. For them the pain turns out to be the blessing.

    There is one passage to get through before that, though. It is the one where you look at the way the ego has been running your life and admit, plainly, that it was shit. Clay settling back down to where clay goes.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God

    Someone at the seminar put two questions to me at once. You said to love the Self. Is recognising the shadow and going through individuation what you mean by self-love, or have you changed your terms on us? And you said that meeting the Self inside me is meeting God. Taking the object relationship I had with my mother as a child and swapping the object over to God — that part confuses me.

    Anyone who heard it that way would be right to be confused. Heard that way, it is an instruction to clear the mother out and seat God where the mother had been. That is not what I said. What I said was about the seat itself — what kind of seat it already was before anybody sat down in it.

    Individuation is the closest thing to self-love

    The first question first. Recognising the shadow, going through individuation — is that self-love? Individuation is the closest thing to it that I know of. The terms did not change. The same road got called by a second name.

    Read it as object relations: you follow the relationship you formed with your parents early on all the way down, and at the bottom of it you meet the actual Self.

    Once you start looking inside yourself in order to talk about self-love, you keep going inward. Sadness allowed to stay sadness. Joy allowed to stay joy. Depression allowed to stay depression — permitted, received. That process is the process of loving yourself. And when the looking runs out of room, at the terminus where the thing you call I finally stops, there is something divine sitting in that place. That place is the Self.

    Which is why we feel our parents as gods

    A human being is made in the image of God. Go down inside a person and at the bottom stands a divine object. Object here means whatever your mind is fastened to. The parent-object is one of those. Which is why we feel our parents as gods. The thing at the far end is a divine object; the parent fills that place in practice; and so it is the parent you find sitting there.

    Nobody is asking you to remove your mother from your mind and replace her with God. As an infant, your survival depended on the parent who fed, held, and returned to you, so that parent was experienced as absolute. The religious claim here is that this psychological place of ultimacy points beyond the parent to the divine Self. Recognising that does not erase the mother; it changes what you understand the child’s absolute dependence to have been reaching toward.

    We did not make ourselves

    God turning up in the middle of a psychology seminar unsettles people, so here is the broad shape. We are not self-originating. We were made — creatures. Which means there is something of God in us, the breath of God, an element of him. And that makes loving ourselves and loving God the same in kind. Self-love widens at this point. It runs past the personal and reaches the origin of the human being.

    I have come at this from the other direction before. In So I Was That Angry Too: The Rage I Couldn’t Name I wrote about putting down what my hands had been gripping, becoming nothing at all, and finding God standing in that spot. That place you reach by letting go. This one you reach by going all the way in.

    Whole rather than perfect

    The place where you meet God is the place where you become whole. Whole rather than perfect. Arrive there whole and you are in a state that can hold another person. Loving yourself turns into loving somebody else — you become able to do it.

    Can you truly love yourself? That question runs straight into another one: can you meet another person with real love? Can you give your own child real love? And real love is not love for the capable, handsome, impressive version. It is love for what you take to be the inferior part (That isn’t love, that’s liking).

    “The world is my representation” — so what is different here?

    The second question came from the floor. Buddhism talks about self-love now, and so do other traditions — you train, and you change by it. The world is my representation; how I take it in decides what world I get. The psychology side is a plus and the counselling side is a plus. What I want to know is where God’s part is in all this.

    Love itself is God’s part

    Christians get confused at this point, and then put all their weight on that question. They look for God’s part on the visible level — something staged where it can be seen. It is not that. Love itself is God’s part. Love itself, plainly. That we love ourselves, forgive ourselves, love another person — take it that the breath of God and his grace are doing that through us.

    Forgiveness is the action arm of love

    God loving us, and us loving God, is self-love. And that self-love spreads outward into love of the neighbour. Forgiveness is the action arm of love. Where love starts, forgiveness has to start with it.

    Love and forgiveness begin at the same address. They begin with me. Not with the other person. I have to forgive myself before I can forgive anyone else; with myself unforgiven, forgiving someone else is work that will not hold. Love runs the same way. I love myself first, respect myself, decline to dismiss myself — and out of that I can keep from dismissing anyone else. What forgiving yourself first looks like in practice, I wrote out in Say It and You Don’t Do It.

    Look at how people raise their children and the whole thing is visible. A parent who does not love himself treats his children poorly — dismisses them, handles them roughly. A parent who loves himself holds his children in enormous respect. He listens closely to what the child has to say, takes the child’s feeling into account, and handles the matter with that feeling in view. All of it settles along one line: whether the person can love himself or not.

    Use what you need to use, wear what you need to wear, and then

    So here is what I tell people. Use what you need to use, wear what you need to wear, and after that, go help somebody. That is the order it runs in. And whoever can do it should start. If you can say that whatever else is going on, there is some peace in you and some happiness — start there.

    Nobody asked you to swap the mother’s seat for God. What I said was what kind of seat it was to begin with.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. Collected Works, Vol. 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. — the definition of individuation.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Chiron’s Wound: When the Lid Stops Holding

    Burying it was never a character flaw. I want that settled before anything else, because people skip past it and then carry a low hum of shame through everything that follows.

    For a long stretch you had a method, and it worked. Something hurt, so you didn’t look at it. You set it in the back somewhere and got on with the morning.

    Then the method begins to fail. Memories return without warning, small events produce reactions that feel too large, and the feelings you once postponed begin interrupting ordinary days.

    What a week actually held back then

    You buried it because burying it was how you kept going. You have to get through the day. Somebody was waiting on you — a shift that started early, a kid who needed picking up, a parent who expected the Sunday call, a bill with a date printed on it. You couldn’t stop and sit with an old injury and still be out the door on time.

    Look honestly at what a week contained back then. There was no afternoon in it for this. There was no one in it who could have covered for you while you sat down with the worst thing that ever happened to you. So the wound got a lid, and the lid held, and the week got done.

    You covered the sore place and looked away from it. That wasn’t weakness. That was an adaptation — the right move for the conditions you were living in. It kept you upright. It deserves some credit, not an apology.

    Somewhere around forty, the method quits

    Then it stops working. In my experience that’s usually somewhere around forty, give or take a few years.

    Something begins in people around then. You start, slowly and without deciding to, to live as yourself — rather than as the person you put together just to get through it. Jung had a word for that: individuation. Heavy word, plain meaning. You become the particular person you are, instead of the useful version of you that the years required.

    Here’s the catch. You cannot become more fully yourself while continuing to organize your life around never feeling what happened.

    The avoided experience has to be recognized as an injury rather than treated as evidence of weakness. That recognition connects present reactions to their cause. Without it, you may remain highly functional while continuing to avoid relationships, situations, and feelings that remind you of the wound.

    Which is why, right around then, the mind starts bringing things back out. What you set in the back somewhere won’t stay where you put it. You cry at something small and feel ridiculous about it. A certain tone of voice from a coworker drops you into a room you haven’t thought about in a very long time. It can look like falling apart. It isn’t only that.

    A mind doesn’t get wider for free

    Think about what it takes to build a body. You pay for it in the body. The strain, the shaking on the last rep, the ache the next morning that tells you exactly which muscle you used.

    Psychological growth also requires strain. When you begin facing what you avoided, you may cry more easily, feel tired, remember forgotten details, or become angry about things you once minimized. Those reactions are the immediate cost of allowing previously excluded experience back into awareness.

    The centaur who couldn’t die

    There’s an old story I keep returning to here. It’s about Chiron.

    He was one of the centaurs — part man, part horse. His father was a god, and that was why his body couldn’t die. Then a poisoned arrow found him.

    Anybody else would have died from that poison. That’s what such a poison is for. Chiron couldn’t. And in his case, being unable to die was not a gift. It meant feeling what the poison did to him, with no end to it. Pain with no far edge.

    Most people recognize that shape without needing the myth explained. Something got in a long time ago. It didn’t kill you. It also never finished.

    He went down, not around

    The pain grew so large that Chiron went down — to Hades, the world below.

    He had no death of his own to die. Prometheus was chained to a rock under a punishment that would not end. So Chiron gave up the deathlessness — handed it over, so that Prometheus could be let off the rock — and took a death he could finally die.

    He didn’t come back up. He was already the physician before any of this, the one Asclepius learned medicine from. What the wound changed was the kind of physician he was: patient, merciful, grown.

    Notice what the story says about pain. Chiron did not escape it by distraction or by waiting for it to disappear. He faced it directly and accepted that his old form of life could not continue. In psychological terms, change begins when avoidance stops and the injury is allowed to become conscious.

    The other road was open the whole time

    This is the part I find most useful, and it’s the easiest one to miss.

    Chiron had another option. There are ways to arrange a life so that pain stops reaching you. Keep the calendar full. Never be alone in a quiet house. Stay busy enough that nothing ever catches up with you. He could have done all of that, and he would have lived. People live that way for a long time.

    But avoiding pain this way has a cost. You may keep answering messages and meeting obligations while losing interest, emotional range, and closeness with other people. The life remains functional, but less and less of you is emotionally present in it.

    He didn’t take that road. He faced it straight on, body and spirit together, all the way down — and that is the only reason he was any good afterward.

    Watch a child after a hard stretch

    Anyone who has raised one knows this. A child goes through something genuinely difficult, and afterward the child is bigger. Not taller. Steadier. Handling things nobody taught them in the meantime. You catch yourself thinking, when did that happen?

    None of it is pleasant while it runs. The child doesn’t enjoy it, and neither does anybody standing nearby, watching and unable to fix it. The growth shows up later, and only to people who kept looking.

    Pain does the same thing to grown people. It takes longer, and it’s uglier while it runs. When you’re hurting, you look at everything again. Things you thought were fixed turn out to be things somebody decided. Things you never once noticed become the only things in the room. Who actually calls. What you keep apologizing for. Which rooms you go quiet in.

    It’s an awful way to learn anything, and I wouldn’t wish the tuition on anyone. But people who go through it without running usually build something steadier on the other side than what they had before.

    A name said once, inside your own head

    I’m not going to tell you to open anything today. Opening takes preparation, and preparation isn’t something a page can hand you.

    There’s a smaller thing, though. One item has probably been surfacing lately — most likely the one that showed up while you were reading this. Don’t write it down. Name it silently, in your head, in about three words. “That thing she said.” “The one nobody ever asked about.” That short.

    No explaining. No working out what it means. All it does is admit there is something under the lid, and admitting is where this starts.

    Chiron carried the poison all the way down with him, and he is remembered as a physician.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1928). The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 7. — individuation.
    • Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. New York: Aldus Books.

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • The Brighter the Light, the Darker the Shadow: Carl Jung on the Part You Won’t Look At

    You know someone who has never once been wrong — not in their own account of it, anyway. The argument was the other person’s fault, the job went bad because the manager had it in for them, and the friendship ended because the friend was the one who changed.

    You nod along, mostly, because arguing with a story like that costs more than it’s worth. Then one evening you catch yourself telling a story of your own the same way — every piece accounted for, every motive explained, except your own part in the thing.

    That blank spot, where your own part should be, is what this article is about.

    Why does insisting you are right leave you in the dark about yourself?

    We prefer to remember the moments when we were capable, generous, and reasonable. But refusing to recognize anything else in ourselves does not make our envy, selfishness, and cruelty disappear. We simply stop seeing them in ourselves and start noticing them mainly in other people. When we see them in someone else, they can make us far angrier than the situation calls for. Over time, the story becomes simple: I am the reasonable one, and everyone else is the problem.

    Jung called the rejected side of the personality the shadow. It contains whatever does not fit the good image you want to maintain: envy when a friend succeeds, the wish to humiliate someone who embarrassed you, or pleasure at the failure of a rival. The more firmly you insist that you are only kind and fair, the less able you become to recognize these reactions as your own.

    This leads somewhere uncomfortable. When sunlight falls on something, the stronger the light, the darker the shadow behind it. It works the same way in us: the harder you insist on seeing only your good side, the darker your shadow grows. So the people most certain of their own decency often have the darkest shadow of all, and they are the ones who do not see it.

    Does having a shadow make you ill?

    Here’s where people get it backwards. Having a dark side is not what makes a person ill — Jung was plain about that. What makes a person ill is refusing to look at it.

    A feeling you keep denying does not go away. It starts steering what you do without your noticing. Envy may show up as relentless criticism of a successful colleague. Anger may come out as sarcasm toward a family member who did nothing to cause it. Jung’s point was that once you name the feeling and admit it is yours, it can no longer steer you from behind — and you get to choose whether to act on it.

    That sounds easy written down. It isn’t. Something in us resists looking, and not out of laziness. Seeing our own envy or cruelty would break the good picture we hold of ourselves, so part of us would rather not look at all.

    Where do you look for the part you can’t see?

    If you are hiding this part from yourself, and the people around you can see it plainly, where do you even begin to look?

    Jung’s first answer was dreams.

    Jung’s school of psychology is called analytical psychology, and it puts so much weight on dreams that it could fairly be called a psychology of dreams. Many popular books about dreams have been shaped by it. For Jung, dreams were a way to find the part of yourself you have not been looking at.

    There’s a reason he started there: you do not get to choose what you dream. A dream takes no interest in which picture of yourself you would rather keep, so it can show you what you have pushed out of your waking mind, in the form of people and scenes. Unlike the stories you tell about yourself when you are awake, it doesn’t take your side.

    Do all dreams come from the same depth?

    No. Some float near the surface — you ate too late or had a difficult meeting, and your brain shuffles the day’s events and plays them back to you. Underneath those are dreams that come from your own unconscious, the part of your mind that holds what you are not aware of. These dreams draw on your own life: your history, the people in it, the business you never got to finish.

    And beneath that personal layer there is a deeper one. Jung called it the collective unconscious: a layer of the mind that does not come from your own experience. In his view we are born with it, it is older than any single life, and we share it with people we will never meet.

    Dreams from this layer carry what Jung called archetypes: images that turn up again and again across many different lives and cultures. In a dream like this, a flood, a threatening animal, a ruler, or a figure waiting at a gate can feel larger than anything that has happened to you lately. You may wake with intense fear or awe and keep thinking about the image all day. For Jung, that emotional force is the sign that the dream comes from somewhere deeper than your memories of yesterday.

    Why can images from this deep layer be frightening?

    Because they carry real force. “Frightening” here doesn’t mean spooky, or even unpleasant. It means they are strong enough to swallow up the waking mind.

    The ego is the part of your mind that holds on to who you are, keeps track of what is real, and keeps what is happening inside you separate from what is happening in the world. If images and feelings from the unconscious grow stronger than the ego can handle, a person can lose their footing. At worst, they lose touch with reality and can no longer tell a dream image from what is actually happening in their life.

    The unconscious is also much larger than we usually picture. Waking awareness has limits: it can take in only what your own senses bring to it. In Jung’s view, the unconscious is not bound by that limit.

    People sometimes say they knew someone far away had died before anybody called to tell them. In his memoir, Jung wrote that before the First World War broke out, he had visions of terrible destruction. Stories like these, Jung’s included, are personal reports. They are not scientific proof that anyone can see the future, and reading them that way misses the point. The point is simpler: what lies in the unconscious is not small, and it is not tame.

    What did Jung do with these experiences, and what did he refuse to do?

    Jung never went around announcing what he saw, the way a fortune-teller might. No stage, no readings, no room full of paying strangers waiting to hear what was coming. Instead he turned inward, into what he called his confrontation with the unconscious: he watched what rose up in him and wrote it down in his own hand.

    Jung did not simply receive this way of working with the unconscious. He built it himself, slowly, and kept at it. But this kind of work has a condition: if the ego is not healthy, what rises up from the unconscious can swallow the ego whole.

    Is your ego healthy enough to hold what comes up from the unconscious?

    If you forget everything else here, keep this part.

    Here is one way to tell. If a single difficult conversation leaves you unable to work, sleep, or feel like yourself again for several days, your ego may not yet be steady enough for dream work. An ego that one hard conversation can knock over is in no shape to meet images far stronger than that. At that point, diving into your dreams is more likely to leave you confused and shaken than to help you understand yourself.

    This matters when the dream belongs to someone else, too. Dreams are fun, and that is exactly the trouble with them. A friend tells you her dream over coffee, and you have an interpretation ready before the cup goes back down. Usually it’s harmless. But if she is already close to falling apart, one confident sentence from somebody she trusts can push her over the edge. So when you hear yourself begin, “Your father in that dream stands for…”, stop there. Not at a café table, not as a remark tossed off in passing, and not from you. You are her friend, not her therapist.

    So there’s an order to this, and the order is not a formality. Steady the ego first: keep up your sleep, meals, work and relationships, and stay grounded in everyday reality. Go deep afterward. Skipping that order is how people get hurt, and the person who pushed too fast, into their own dreams or into a friend’s, almost always meant well.

    If your life is steady right now, here’s the smallest possible way into your dreams, and it’s small on purpose. Tomorrow morning, before your feet hit the floor, write down a single image from the night. Two or three lines, no more than that. Not what it meant. Only what you saw: the corridor, the water, the person who had no business standing in that room.

    No interpreting. That sounds easy and it isn’t, because your mind will hand you a meaning before the pen is back down. Let the meaning come if it wants to, but write down only the image.

    Give it a week and something odd starts happening. The same door keeps showing up. The same stranger, the same weather, the same locked car you can never get into. You’ll begin to notice the repeats — and the repeats are already saying something, long before anyone tries to interpret them.

    One more thing before you go and try it. Sometimes a week of two-line entries turns up an image that is too much for a notebook to handle: one of those archetypal images I described earlier, the kind you wake from in fear or awe and then keep thinking about all day. If a morning comes when what you have written frightens you, that is the morning to stop writing and call a therapist. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. A therapist can answer you back. A notebook can’t, and neither can I — I’m on the other side of this page, with no idea what you are facing. The order I described, steady the ego first and go deep afterward, isn’t me being careful with you. It’s the order the work runs in.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books. — the premonition of the First World War is Jung’s own account in this autobiography.
    • Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1.
    • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 2.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Why Do We Dream? A Jungian Reading of the Night

    Some mornings a dream follows you through the entire day: a hallway that should not be there, someone you have not thought about in years, or a feeling you cannot name. The story makes little sense, yet one image returns in the shower, on the train, and during a meeting. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose way of reading dreams this article follows, would say it matters that the image keeps coming back. Often the dream is carrying something you have not fully felt or thought about while awake: the hurt of an insult you brushed off as nothing, say, or the sadness of a breakup you told yourself you were over.

    Why don’t the feelings you already know about show up in dreams?

    In the psychoanalytic tradition, a feeling or a memory rarely comes up in a dream unless it was first pushed out of your awareness or kept apart from the rest of what you feel. Repression is the pushing out: a feeling or a memory becomes uncomfortable enough that your attention stops going near it. Splitting is the keeping apart. The feeling stays in you, but because it clashes with another feeling you hold, it gets filed under not mine, as though it belonged to someone else. If you cannot bear the thought that you might also hate someone you love, you may admit only the love during the day, and at night dream that you are attacking that person.

    So a dream, simply by arriving, is already telling you something. It suggests there is a piece of your life you’ve pushed out of view, or quietly disowned. What you already know about yourself and accept has no need to come to you in a dream. You can just think about it. What appears at night is more often the part you don’t know — or the part you know and are pretending not to.

    That is why waking with the thought I have no idea what that was about does not make the dream useless. It may feel foreign precisely because it comes from the part of you that you do not know. Instead of forcing an immediate interpretation, you can ask which feeling or image seems least like the person you believe yourself to be.

    What is a dream trying to do when it comes?

    Jung saw a dream as a message. It comes from the unconscious, the part of your mind you are not aware of, and it is addressed to your waking self. Not an instruction. Not a prophecy. Closer to a report that says: this is how you are actually living, and this is what that way of living is leaving out.

    And the message pushes toward balance. Spend a whole day being patient — swallowing what you wanted to say, keeping your voice level, being the reasonable one — and that night you may dream that you are shouting in a supermarket and cannot stop. Jung called this the compensatory function of dreams. To compensate is to make up for something, and here the dream makes up for the side of you that you have been leaving out during the day. This idea of compensation is central to how he read dreams. The picture you have of yourself while awake is always partial. It has to be. You can only pay attention to so much, and each of us builds a workable story about who we are, a story that is bound to leave things out. At night, dreams bring back some of what that story left out.

    Seen this way, an unsettling dream reads differently. The one where you behave badly. The one where you feel something you would rather not feel, or find yourself somewhere you’d never choose to be. It may not be a verdict on your character at all. It may be showing you what your daytime picture of yourself leaves out: a feeling that is really there, but that you have not been able to accept while awake.

    What changes if you treat a dream as a signpost?

    It helps to treat a dream as a signpost rather than as an order. A signpost does not make you do anything. It gives you information, and it can show you that you have drifted off the road you thought you were on. A dream in which you shout does not instruct you to shout at anyone. It may show that behind the patience you keep up during the day there is anger you have not yet admitted to yourself.

    When people approach dreams the way they’d approach a fortune-teller, they get stuck on a single question: so what am I supposed to do? Dreams don’t answer that question, so the whole exercise starts to feel useless, or people are tempted to make up an answer. Read the dream as a signpost instead, and you ask a different question, one you can actually work with: Where’s the gap between the road I believe I’m on and the direction the dream seems to be pointing? In the shouting dream, it is the gap between the patient person you believe you are and the anger the dream shows you. That gap is what you work with. You don’t have to close it tonight. You only have to notice that it’s there.

    Dream dictionaries tend to disappoint because they give each symbol one fixed meaning, and a dream is about your own particular life. A snake, a house, a dog — none of these means the same thing to everyone. A dog may bring to mind a protector for one person and, for another, the fear left over from being bitten as a child. What matters far more is what the image is connected to in your own life right now, and how it felt while you were inside the dream.

    Have you been dreaming much more than usual lately?

    The more you are keeping out of your awareness, the more frequent or vivid your dreams may become. You may be functioning normally during the day while repeatedly avoiding grief, anger, or a decision that feels too costly. At night, when you are no longer steering your own attention, what you have been avoiding comes back as images.

    It’s worth being precise about what this avoiding looks like, because repression, the pushing out described earlier, gets imagined as something far more dramatic than it is. It isn’t a decision. Nobody sits down and resolves to bury a feeling. Something simply needed to be felt and lived through, and it hurt, and your attention turned away. That’s the whole mechanism: a turning away, repeated so often that you no longer notice it happening.

    But what you turned away from doesn’t disappear. It waits. And at night, when the daytime habit of turning away loosens its grip, it comes up.

    If your dreams have become more frequent or more vivid lately, that may deserve a gentle question rather than alarm: What have I been busy not looking at?

    Why does living against your own nature bring suffering?

    Jung held a plain view: when we live at odds with our own nature, we run into suffering.

    Don’t hear this as moral advice. He isn’t describing a code of conduct, and none of it is about being good. Living by your own nature means something far more ordinary: feeling what you actually feel and going through it, instead of looking away because it hurts. Being sad when you are sad. Recognizing anger as anger instead of relabeling it as tiredness, or maturity, or being reasonable. Admitting that fear is fear.

    A good deal of psychological pain has this shape: the original feeling is avoided, but the effort of avoiding it creates another layer of suffering. Anger relabeled as tiredness may come out as irritation with people who did not cause it. Grief that is never acknowledged may show up as sleeplessness or emotional flatness. The dream is one more place where the avoided feeling can return.

    What about the dreams that feel ancient and strange?

    Sometimes a dream doesn’t feel personal at all. Something in it seems older than your own life: a ritual, ancient symbols, a gloomy, primitive scene unlike anything you have lived through. People often hesitate to mention dreams like this, because they seem to reveal something disturbing about the dreamer.

    Jung believed that if you go on not looking at what is inside you, it gains more and more influence over you, until your dreams are no longer limited to your own life. Besides the people you know and the rooms you have stood in, they start showing you scenes you have never been anywhere near. These scenes come from what Jung called the collective unconscious: a layer of the mind that belongs to human beings as a whole rather than to your own life. It holds images that seem to come with being human: a flood, a chase, a giant, a figure waiting at a gate. Nobody taught them to you, and someone born on the other side of the world dreams them too. Not all of this shared layer is gentle. Cruelty and a raw, primitive side are part of that human inheritance too, which is one reason such dreams can feel both foreign and dark.

    When an image like that comes up, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It does not tell you what kind of person you are. The same flood, the same figure at the gate, turn up in the sleep of people who have nothing in common with you, or with each other. It may mean that something you have not been looking at has been building up for a while, and that what is rising now reaches past your own history into that layer shared by all human beings.

    What could you try tonight?

    Put a sheet of paper and a pen where you can reach them from bed. Not your phone: the screen pulls you fully awake, and the dream stays within reach only while you are still half asleep.

    When you wake, don’t try to interpret anything yet, or to piece the whole story together. That can come later. Write down one image you remember, in a single line. Then one word beside it for how it felt. Hallway. Ashamed. That’s enough. It should take under a minute.

    Do this for a week or so, then read the page back. Don’t try to squeeze a meaning out of it. Look for repetition instead: the image that keeps returning, the feeling word you’ve now written four times. What keeps coming back often points to what you have been turning away from during the day. Then ask where in your waking life the same feeling comes up: around a decision at work you keep putting off, say, or something you wanted to say to someone in your family and swallowed. You don’t have to do anything about it yet. Noticing where the dream keeps pointing is already a start.

    This article is educational and reflective in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individual assessment or treatment. If your dreams come with persistent distress, disrupted sleep, or intrusive memories that are hard to manage, it is safer to look at them with a qualified mental health professional in your area than on your own.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. New York: Aldus Books.
    • Jung, C. G. (1934). The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis. Collected Works, Vol. 16.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board