Table Of ContentWorking With Dreams
This book is about the practice of working with dreams. Rather than presenting a general
theory about dreams, it focuses on the dream as phenomenon and raises the question how
we must look at dreams if our approach is supposed to be a truly psychological one. So
far most essays on, and the practice of, Jungian dream interpretation have paradoxically
centered around the person of the dreamer and not around the dream itself. Dreams were
used as a means to understand the analysand and what is going on in him or her. Jung’s
fundamental shift from his earlier person- based psychology and pre- alchemy stance to his
mature soul-b ased psychology, informed by the hermetic logic of alchemy, has not been
followed, which was already noted by Jung himself: “My later and more important work
(as it seems to me) is still left untouched in its primordial obscurity.”
The present study is based decidedly on the stance of mature Jung and his very different
views about dreams. His most crucial insights in this regard include that in dreams the
soul speaks about itself (not about the dreamer), that the dream is its own interpretation
and therefore needs to be circumambulated (rather than translated into the language of
psychology and everyday life), and that dream images have everything they need within
themselves (rather than needing associations from the dreamerʼs daily life). This book
discusses in detail what all this means in practice and what it demands of the psychologist.
A decisive transposition away from ordinary consciousness, a “crossing to the other side of
the river,” is required of the consciousness that wants to approach dreams psychologically.
Numerous aspects of dreams and special questions that come up in working with dreams
are discussed. At the end of this book our working with dreams is situated in the wider
question of the psychological task in general by exploring Jungʼs insistence that psych-
ology has to transcend the “consulting room,” Hillman’s move “From mirror to window”
and, in Plato’s parable, the revolutionary move out of, and return to, “the cave.”
While limited to the topic of dreams this book may also serve as an indirect introduction
to an understanding of psychology as a “psychology with soul” (Jung) or as the discipline
of interiority.
Wolfgang Giegerich is a Jungian analyst, now living in Berlin, and the author of numerous
books, among them What is Soul? and Neurosis: The Logic of a Metaphysical Illness.
His most recent works are The Historical Emergence of the I and What Are the Factors
That Heal?
Working With Dreams
Initiation into the Soul’s Speaking
About Itself
Wolfgang Giegerich
First published 2021
by Routledge
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© 2021 Wolfgang Giegerich
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British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-52510-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-52513-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05824-3 (ebk)
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Contents
Sources and abbreviations viii
Introduction 1
I What is a dream? 7
The dream as a conscious phenomenon: The dream as text 7
Ontological rupture 12
The dream as interpretation 17
“Ontology” of the dream- internal world 21
1. The seeing of a dream 22
2. Mutability and malleability 23
3. Shadowiness 26
4. Lacunality 28
5. “Just in time” apparition, not substantial being 29
6. Concepts cloaked in sensible shapes 31
II Why dreams? 34
The significance of dreams in therapy 34
1. The soul’s speaking 34
2. “I do not know the answer either” 38
3. Dreams versus sandplay and painting 41
4. Listening to patients’ stories as if they were dreams? 43
When patients don’t dream 45
III The proper attitude towards the dream 51
Crossing the river: The standpoint of soul 51
The three stances to “crossing the river” and the three forms
of otherness 55
Psychotherapy— the making of psychology 57
The dream as corpse 66
vi Contents
Not knowing as methodological starting point 73
The necessity of my going under 76
IV The dream interpreter 81
Whom does the therapist address when working on dreams
with a patient? 81
Who in the therapist interprets the dream? 85
My interpretation 91
The Now of dream interpretation 94
V Interpreting the actual text of dreams 98
“Object level,” “subject level” and the objective psyche 98
Trap: Dream interpretation as the dream’s translation into the
terms of one’s psychological theory 100
Getting started: Beginning with the subject. Circumambulating
the dream 103
Turning to the “object”: The dream as subject and self 109
Inner infinity and the wildness of the living image 115
Actually working with dreams 119
Discerning the proper horizon of and context for individual
dream elements 122
Narcissistic blow: “It has a say now, not you!” Or: The patient
as obstacle 126
The dream- I 132
The dream- I and the other 137
1. Necessary distinctions and decisions 137
2. The antagonists 141
3. The soul’s via negativa 142
4. How to view the ego defenses in dreams 143
5. Opposition as obvious conflict between Two and the
dialectic of successful flight 146
6. Opposition as the dream- I’s malgré lui doing the
other’s bidding 149
7. Opposition as antithetical meaning of one and the same 150
8. Opposition as impugning the known truth 152
Psychic and biological processes in dreams 155
Semantic content versus syntactic structure 158
VI By way of one example: A dream and its psychological
interpretation 166
Contents vii
VII The dream and the patient 176
The therapy situation as impairment of dream interpretation 176
Absolute- negative interiorization of the patient into the dream 179
“So the dream shows me that. And now?” 180
Terrible dream images, unbearable for the patient? 182
VIII Miscellaneous questions 185
The types and topics of dreams 185
Does the dream have a message for us? 187
Archetypal dream motifs. Numinous, religious dreams? 189
Whose dream is it? 195
“Big” dreams 197
The dream series 201
Excursus: Can one learn to interpret dreams? 203
IX The ulterior purpose of and assignment for dream
interpretation: From Natura to Ars 206
X Beyond working with dreams 214
Pushing off to the dimension of the soul’s real life 214
Index 220
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Sources and abbreviations
For frequently cited sources, the following abbreviations have been used:
CW: Jung, C. G., Collected Works. 20 vols. Ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard
Adler, and William McGuire. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957– 1979. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by paragraph number.
GW: Jung, C. G., Gesammelte Werke, 20 vols., various editors, Olten and Freiburg im
Breisgau: Walter- Verlag, 1971– 1983. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by
paragraph number.
Letters: Jung, C. G., Letters. 2 vols. Ed. Gerhard Adler. Bollingen Series XCV: 2. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975.
MDR: Jung, C. G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Rev. ed., Ed. Aniela Jaffé. Trans.
Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Cited by page number.
Erinn.: Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken von C.G. Jung, ed. by Aniela Jaffé, Zürich and
Stuttgart (Rascher) 1967.
CEP: Giegerich, W., Collected English Papers, 6 vols. New Orleans, LA (Spring Journal
Books), 2006 ff., now London and New York (Routledge) 2020.
Transl. modif.: Appearing at the end of a citation, this indicates that I modified the par-
ticular quotation from the Collected Works in order to bring the English translation a bit
closer to the wording and spirit of Jung’s original German text.
Introduction
It is clear from the title of this book, Working with Dreams, that its focus is on the
practical aspects of dream interpretation. It is, first of all, addressed to analysts
who in their psychotherapeutic sessions with patients or analysands are confronted
with their dreams and have to work with them. Writing from within the Jungian
tradition of psychology, I will not offer a general theory of dreams, what they are,
and why and how they come about. I will not try to explain them, be it from the
“psychic apparatus,” from a person’s biography or daily- life experience, from the
brain and the newest neurophysiological findings, not from archetypes, let alone
as the voice of God or angels. I am only concerned with the phenomenon “dream”
itself as it actually appears in human experience (especially in the context of psy-
chotherapeutic processes) and our approach to it.
As I pointed out, the focus of Working with dreams is decidedly on practical
aspects. But this immediately raises the question of what “practical” means in
psychology. Other than science and technology, psychology cannot become
practical in the sense of being solely intent upon the object, which means in our
case that it cannot apply itself directly to dreams. It is constitutive for psych-
ology that it must not forget itself, the psychologically thinking subjective mind,
the consciousness that is doing the thinking. For this reason this book, despite
being about the practice of dream interpretation, is not conceived as a practical
help for the practitioner, a kind of “how- to” book of dream interpretation and is
therefore not either full of case reports with dream examples or individual dream
symbols, whose meaning is given. It cannot serve as a reference book on dream
images. Instead, the main purpose of this book, as of any psychological study, is
the training of the reader’s psychological mind, the psychological preparation of
the psychologist’s, of our own, thinking, in this case our thinking about dreams.
The central questions to be answered are: how do we have to view and approach
dreams if our access to dreams is supposed to be truly psychological? This book
is, one might say, one long meditation about the general principles of psycho-
logical dream interpretation.
The question of when our working with dreams is truly psychological and
when not is crucial. If this book is concerned with the phenomenon “dream” and
does not see dreams against the backdrop of a given overall (be it scientific or
