Dreams, images, and everyday phenomenon are important… Why?
Dreams, images and creativity share common origins within the unconscious. They hold powerful emotions, moving us to laugh, cry, or connect to memories of an earlier time in life. Have you ever laughed—or had your mood suddenly change, not knowing why? That’s the impact of the unconscious!
Depth Psychology was developed by C. G. Jung as a means to communicate with the unconscious and integrate splits or splinter personalities, found in multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder (DID). Today, Jungian therapy techniques are used to deeply understand and heal other conditions, including eating disorders, bipolar, depression, and anxiety.
The unconscious communicates to us nightly in our dreams, even if we do not remember them. The language used is primarily images or pictures, though sometimes in dreams words and musical themes are important as well. Dream-time is when our brains sort and file our experiences, assigning categories of meaning to each memory as it is processed.
Sometimes an error is made, when memories are sorted into categories indicating danger, even when we are safe. This especially happens when the new memory is similar to another, threatening memory from childhood. In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) terms, this new memory becomes a Cognitive Distortion. In Jungian or Depth Therapy terms, the negative childhood complex is drawing energy to itself, collecting evidence to grow stronger and more fierce in its everyday expression. This is how our world becomes smaller and smaller as unresolved trauma looms ever-larger. Without therapy we withdraw from the triggers, which means we withdraw from life.
The beauty of the Depth Approach in Psychoanalysis, is that we find these inner meanings symbolized in Dreams, or images (Art Therapy). Bringing consciousness to the distortion corrects the negative meaning. We realize that the threatening “assigned category” of the memory is part of a larger pattern that is no longer true, and working against our hopes and goals. This is one example of why dream analysis is so very important to resolving anxiety and PTSD. The light of consciousness bears freedom from old wounds.
Although there are some more commonly known symbols used by our unconscious psyche, in Jungian Analysis each word and each image are taken as new and fresh with no preconceived certainty, as each person is an individual with their own unique experiences. Jungian Analysts are especially trained to consider each patient’s associations and personal history to the dream material, to reveal a coherent story that the unconscious is trying to communicate to the patient and sometimes to their therapist!
