Inner Work Notes

Tag: jungian psychology

  • 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

  • Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts

    You already know the relationship is hurting you. You know how tired you are and how often you have been disappointed. You may even have packed a bag or promised yourself that the next incident would be the last.

    But when you imagine leaving, another thought appears: He would fall apart without me. She would not manage. Everything would collapse because I stopped holding it together.

    If you have wondered why you cannot leave a relationship that keeps hurting you, love may not be the only reason you stay. Codependency may also be holding you there: you have become responsible for keeping the other person stable, and you believe that if you sacrifice enough, your care will eventually change them.

    Have you ever thought, “They would not make it without me”?

    Codependency is a way of relating in which another person’s problems become your responsibility. When they drink, you call their employer and say they are sick. When they forget a bill, you pay it before the service is disconnected. When they become angry, you change your words and behavior to calm them. Once you have done this again and again, caring for them is no longer just one part of your life. It becomes your role, and you start to feel that you matter only as long as you are solving their problems.

    From the outside, this looks like devotion. The devotion is real. People in this position often give more than anyone around them and continue giving after they are exhausted. But underneath the giving, there is often an unspoken condition: If I sacrifice enough, this person will change.

    You may never say this condition aloud. It may feel like commitment rather than a bargain. But the expectation still shapes what you do. You give up sleep, money, friendships, and plans of your own because you believe each sacrifice brings the other person closer to becoming responsible, sober, affectionate, or stable.

    People rarely change because someone else has sacrificed for them. Change must begin inside the person who needs to change. When that change does not happen, however, you often reach the wrong conclusion. Instead of thinking, They are not choosing to change, you think, I have not loved them well enough yet.

    That conclusion creates a repeating cycle. They create another problem. You step in and repair the damage. They avoid the consequences of what they did. Because the crisis has passed, you feel briefly relieved. Then the same problem returns, and you try even harder. You give more and more, but they take no more responsibility for their own behavior. You believe you are helping. But because you keep taking the consequences onto yourself, they never have to face them, and so they have no reason to change.

    Why were they so good to you at the beginning?

    People with an addiction, or with some other trouble they have never dealt with, are often unusually attentive at the beginning of a relationship. They listen closely, respond quickly, and adjust themselves to what you need. Their warmth may be sincere. At the same time, the part of them that desperately needs the relationship is working hard to make sure you do not leave.

    Later, when they feel certain that the relationship will continue, that effort may disappear. The person who once called every night stops answering. The person who noticed every change in your mood now dismisses your pain. Because you experienced their warmth at the beginning, you remember that warm person as who they really are. The way they treat you now seems like a temporary change, not the whole relationship.

    This is why you keep thinking, He was a good man when we met. She used to understand me. If I respond correctly, we can return to that time. Each brief return of affection strengthens that expectation. A kind weekend after weeks of conflict can convince you that the person you first met is coming back. You stay not only because of what the relationship is now, but because you are still waiting for it to become what it was at the beginning.

    The longer you stay, the harder it becomes to leave. You have already put in years, money, and patience, and given up many plans of your own. Leaving now can feel as though you are admitting that none of those sacrifices produced the change you expected. To avoid that conclusion, you make one more effort. The more the relationship costs you, the more determined you become to make the cost mean something.

    Did you really choose this person?

    As a therapist, when I look at a relationship, I pay attention to how each person was already handling fear, loneliness, and responsibility before the two of them met. Give two people the same difficult month and they may respond in completely different ways. One asks three friends for help within two days. The other becomes silent, hides the problem, and waits for someone to notice. Each person brings a way of coping like this into a relationship.

    You also came into your relationship with patterns of your own. You may be drawn to people who need rescuing because being useful makes you feel secure. You may trust an emotionally distant person quickly, because that distance feels familiar. You may work harder for affection if, as a child, love was something you had to earn. These patterns usually shape your choice of partner long before you can put them into words.

    This is why the faces can change while the shape of your relationships stays the same. One partner drinks and another withdraws, but you become the responsible one in both relationships. You make excuses for them, wait, repair the damage, and give another chance. The details change, but your role and the ending remain familiar.

    In these relationships, choice is shaped by familiarity. You can mistake what feels familiar for what is right for you. You do not consciously decide to repeat the same pain. You recognize the familiar feel of the relationship long before you see what it will cost you.

    Why do their words sound like something you have heard before?

    Suppose your partner swears at you, and as you hear it, you remember your father swearing at you in almost the same words decades earlier. The current scene hurts, but it is not unfamiliar. You already learned what to do in this kind of relationship: become quiet, watch the other person’s mood, wait for the anger to pass, and try not to make the situation worse.

    Because of that history, familiar pain can feel safer than a calm you are not used to. Your body already knows the sequence. Their voice changes, your muscles tighten, you stop saying what you think, and your attention moves from your own feelings to the other person’s reaction. In a calm relationship, nobody needs to be rescued or watched. Because you have not practiced living that way, calm can feel empty or uncertain rather than safe.

    Psychoanalysis calls this pull toward familiar pain the repetition compulsion: without realizing it, you keep going back to the kind of emotional situation you first lived through as a child. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called a knot of early feelings and memories a complex. A complex does not remain in the past. It influences which people attract your attention, what behavior you excuse, and which role you automatically take when conflict begins.

    This is why your partner’s words can sound like your father’s. The present relationship puts you back in the place you held with your father as a child. You again become the person who absorbs the anger, keeps everything from falling apart, and waits for warmth to return. Part of you is also trying to do this time what you could not do back then: finally fix the relationship with your father. That old wish is part of why you try so hard to change your partner. Willpower alone rarely breaks the pattern, because to you this is simply how a relationship works.

    Where does devotion end and codependency begin?

    Devotion and codependency can look almost identical from the outside. In both cases, you may cook, pay bills, attend appointments, and stay close during a crisis. The difference becomes clearer when you look at what happens to your own life while you are helping.

    Here is the first question to ask yourself: If this person never gets better, do I still have a life of my own?

    If you continue sleeping, working, seeing friends, making decisions, and knowing what matters to you, your care is closer to devotion. If their condition determines your mood, your schedule, your self-worth, and whether you are allowed to have a life of your own, then this is codependency.

    The second question is harder: If this person became completely well tomorrow, what would happen to me?

    Imagine that they manage their own money, make their own appointments, regulate their own emotions, and no longer call you to solve each crisis. If you feel relief, then what you wanted all along was to share a life with them, not to carry their life for them. If you feel empty or anxious, being needed may have become the main source of your identity.

    Feeling empty or anxious is not a moral failure, and it does not mean you consciously wanted them to remain unwell. It means the role has been giving you something important: the sense that you matter. When you are the person who notices the unpaid bill, makes the phone call, prepares the meal, and prevents the next disaster, you always know what to do and why you matter.

    If the other person begins doing those things without you, your role disappears. Then another question appears: If nobody needs rescuing today, what do I want to do with my own life? That question can feel frightening when you have put your own wishes, friendships, work, and rest on hold for years.

    If their recovery makes you feel empty instead of relieved, being needed has probably been giving you a reason to remain in the relationship.

    If they were completely well tomorrow, what would you want to do?

    Try writing something today, but not about them. Do not write about what they did last week, why they behaved that way, or what you should have done differently. Instead, write your answer to one question:

    If this person were completely well tomorrow, what would I want to do?

    You may not have an answer. That blank space tells you something important. Your days may have been organized around another person for so long that you have stopped asking what you enjoy, whom you want to see, and where you want your own life to go.

    You do not have to make a final decision about the relationship tonight. Begin with one concrete answer about the life that would still belong to you if the other person were no longer at the center of every day. Write down one place you would visit, one person you would call, or one activity you stopped doing when managing the relationship took over your time.

    What you write down is not yet a plan to leave or stay. It shows that you have needs, wishes, or a direction of your own that do not depend on holding another person together.

    This is educational writing, not treatment. If you are afraid for your safety in this relationship, getting safe and getting outside help come first, before any effort to persuade or change the other person.

    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