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.
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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