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Dreamwork

Dreamwork

Dreamwork names, in the Jungian tradition, the whole discipline by which a dream is received, held, amplified, and allowed to work on the dreamer. The term is inherited from sigmund-freud, who gave it a narrower and inverted sense — for Freud the dream-work was the unconscious process that disguised the latent wish as manifest image, and the analyst’s task was to undo that work (“the work of interpretation therefore aims at demolishing the dream-work,” Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Lecture XI). carl-jung retains the phenomenon and inverts the evaluation. The dream is not a disguise but an utterance; the work is not demolition but reception.

Jungian dreamwork is governed by the hypothesis of compensation and its extension in the prospective-function (Jung, CW 8, §494–495). It proceeds by the method of amplification — placing the dream’s images beside their mythological, alchemical, and religious analogues until the archetypal weight of the image emerges. Where the material calls for it, the dreamwork continues as active-imagination, the waking engagement with the dream’s figures that Jung developed during his 1913–1930 confrontation with the unconscious (The Red Book: Liber Novus).

Two axes of interpretation are distinguished: the objective (dream-figures refer to outer persons and situations) and the subjective (dream-figures personify inner psychic factors) (james-a-hall 1983). The unit of meaning is typically the dream-series rather than the single dream; an initial-dream may be a cluster rather than a single night’s material (Bosnak 1986). The classical Greek tradition, from Homer’s dream-gates of horn and ivory (Od. 19.562) through Asclepian incubation to Plato’s Timaeus, is the tradition’s acknowledged ancestor — the Jungian discipline recovers in modern idiom what Greek religious practice had already known.

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