CARL JUNG (1875 - 1961)

One of the shining icons of the "dream movement" within psychiatry was that of Carl Jung. Here in Melbourne there is even a Carl Jung Society, founded in 1962 by the late Hazel Parker, meeting monthly for those with a common interest in the work and ideas of C G. Jung.

By age six, in 1881, Carl Jung was already experiencing richly symbolic dreams, which he would remember and interpret as an adult. When he was a child he had nightmares in which balls of light floated towards him like malevolent moons, threatening to engulf him. A ball of light is an auspicious symbol which is nearly formless except for being round, suggesting completeness, wholeness; integration of conscious and unconscious, body mind and spirit. Light itself is a formless expression of the wisdom of God; power, energy, ability to see and understand, Christ light within. It may have been that Jung was seeing his higher self depicted here in the dreams. It was the dream symbol of a giant tentacled shellfish or sea creature which prompted him to go in an academic direction in the natural sciences......he being guided in his life by the symbology. He moved from here to the study of medicine. While a scholarship student, Jung was at odds with his own personality, but a dream in 1895 came to him which seemed to calm his distress. He was walking in a terrible storm with only a candle for illumination, and only by cupping his hand around the flame was he able to keep it from blowing out. Feeling he was being followed, he turned around to see a huge black figure following him, he being so frightened that he awoke. The dream to him was that the black figure was his own shadow or subjective self, cast by the candle flame......his mystical side of his divided nature. He felt that he should use the light of his conscious intellect for his studies, but do not ignore the shadow self which has many qualities available too, with deep and ancient wisdom. A few years later he chose psychiatry as a medical specialty.

This lead him towards what Freud was doing and he naturally became associated with the "master" of the time, and eventually was able to work closely with the man. However, the older man's ideas started to create dissonance within Jung as time went along, particularly within the dream context. Whereas Freud's edict that dreams are the outpourings of a troubled mind, Jung's own dreams and his healthy perspective of his own mind came to odds with this. Jung defended the principle that symbols might depict sexual content, but definitely not exclusively. More importantly than any single image, he maintained, was the dream as a whole and its initial impact on the dreamer. To illustrate this he would quote a proverb from the Jewish Talmud: "The dream is its own interpretation." This is the hallmark of current symbolic work to this day, in that the dreamers emotive responses to symbols seen or experienced bear the nexus of meaning. Another's views and symbol interpretation can lend tool to the variations of meaning available as options. He believed that the subconscious, the interface for the conscious to experience some of the unconscious, had paranormal atributes at its deepest levels, beyond space and time. Jung further gave the unconscious the balanced aspect for humanity to use, rather than just a negative side. Further, the bottom of the unconscious also held the collective unconscious, with all of humanity's images and impulses. Similar to the "gene pool", the collective unconscious has memories and desires that may have had their origin in humanity's earliest experiences. These primal memories, he says, are evident in all races and cultures across the planet, and exist through myth, folklore, fairy tales etc. Special symbols which are generic to the collective unconscious he termed Archetypes, and an individual in experiencing these give special significance in waking consciousness. In these respects, the underlying premise that all consciousness is one, is touched upon, and valid to current philosophy. He did note that forms of "self-healing" can occur within an individual via dreams with spontaneously appearing Mandalas. Mandala means circle in Sanskrit, the oldest language on earth, and such symbols give an ordered pattern on chaos. Meditation is used in many cultures and disciplines involving mandalas. The centre is usually focussed on as the "pivot" where all the various symbols of the personality, positive and negative, revolve upon. The symbols are the tools to be used for the process of individuation. Jung experienced many mandalas personally in his dreams through life. Jung concluded that the deepest levels of the subconscious operate beyond space and time, and are attributed to the paranormal experiences of clairvoyance, clairaudience etc.

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