Freud & Jung's Theories of Dreams

"Dreaming men are haunted men," wrote Stephen St. Vincent Benet, and the two greatest classical theoreticians of psychoanalysis and the importance of dreams would have agreed with the poet. But Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung would have differed - and indeed in their lifetimes often did differ - on what it is that haunts us in our dreams. This paper examines the differences in Freud's and Jung's theories on the interpretation of dreams. Because their theories on the importance and meaning of dreams cannot be extricated from the rest of their work, a brief overview is first given of the context of the importance of dreams to each researcher. After providing this needed background, the paper focuses on their work on dreams and concludes with an examination of the implications of these differences.

Freud's very earliest work (some of it almost entirely biological in focus in fact and with little bearing on psychoanalysis at all) is not particularly relevant to his work on dreams. But during the period from 1895 to 1900, Freud began to develop many of the concepts that were later incorporated into psychoanalytic practice and doctrine and have a bearing on his interpretation of dreams (Anserson, 1991, p. 132).

After completing a body of work on the topic of hysteria and experimenting with the use of hypnosis as a cathartic procedure, Freud began during this time to substitute the investigation of the patient's spontaneous flow of thoughts, called free ass

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2, p. 31). Jung's Research on Dreams The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung founded the analytical school of psychology by broadening Freud's psychoanalytical approach, interpreting mental and emotional disturbances as an attempt to find personal and spiritual wholeness. His perspective on the meaning and use of dreams - as is true generally of his work on the human psyche - is more humanistic than Freud's, painting a picture of our inner lives that is more optimistic. Born in 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a Protestant clergyman, Jung developed during his lonely childhood an inclination for dreaming and fantasy that greatly influenced his adult work. After graduating in medicine in 1902 from the universities of Basel and Znrich, with a wide background in biology, zoology, paleontology, and archaeology, he began his work on word association, in which a patient's responses to stimulus words revealed what Jung called "complexes" - a term that has since become universal both within the world of psychoanalysis and throughout the general culture (Barton, 1993, p. 97). These studies brought him international renown and led him to a close collaboration with Freud. With the publication of Psychology of the Unconscious i

Category: Psychology - F