Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams by Carl Jung

The hypothesis we have advanced, that dreams serve the purpose of compensation, is a very broad and comprehensive assumption. It means that we believe the dream to be a normal psychic phenomenon that transmits unconscious reactions or spontaneous impulses to the conscious mind. Since only a small minority of dreams are manifestly compensatory, we must pay particular attention to the language of dreams that we consider to be symbolic. The study of this language is almost a science in itself. It has, as we have seen, an infinite variety of individual expressions. They can be read with the help of the dreamer, who himself provides the associative material, or context of the dream-image, so that we can look at all its aspects as if circumambulating it. This method proves to be sufficient in all ordinary cases, such as when a relative, a friend, or a patient tells you a dream more or less conversationally. But when it is a matter of outstanding dreams, of obsessive or recurrent dreams, or dreams that are highly emotional, the personal associations produced by the dreamer no longer suffice for a satisfactory interpretation. In such cases, we have to take into consideration the fact, already observed and commented on by Freud, that elements often occur in a dream that are not individual and cannot be derived from personal experience. They are what Freud called "archaic remnants"-thought-forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life, but seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited patterns of the human mind.

Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, with a long evolutionary history behind them, so we should expect the mind to be organized in a similar way rather than to be a product without history. By "history" I do not mean the fact that the mind builds itself up through conscious tradition (language, etc.), but rather its biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development beginning with archaic man, whose psyche was still similar to that of an animal. This immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind, just as the structure of our body is erected upon a generally mammalian anatomy. Wherever the trained eye of the morphologist looks, it recognizes traces of the original pattern. Similarly, the experienced investigator of the psyche cannot help seeing the analogies between dream-images and the products of the primitive mind, its représentations collectives, or mythological motifs. But just as the morphologist needs the science of comparative anatomy, so the psychologist cannot do without a "comparative anatomy of the psyche. " He must have a sufficient experience of dreams and other products of the unconscious on the one hand, and on the other of mythology in its widest sense. He cannot even see the analogy between a case of compulsion neurosis, schizophrenia, or hysteria and that of a classical demonic possession if he has not sufficient knowledge of both.