Jung ’ s Theory
It remained for one of Freud ’ s early associates ( later an apostate ), Carl Jung , to examine dreams for evidence of a racial uncon scious that all men share ( Jung 1960 ). Jung was convinced that there was sufficient evidence in dreams and other types of material , e . g ., myths and religion , to validate the concept of a collective unconscious . He called the contents of this unconscious “ archetypes ” and identified a number of them : the anima , the shadow , the earth mother , the wise old man , and , most important of all , the archetype of personal unity symbolically represented in dreams and elsewhere by the form of the mandala . Whereas Freud used dreams to explore the formative years of a person ’ s life , Jung used them to explore the psychological development of the race .
Jung also thought , in contradistinction to Freud , that dreams are oriented to the future as well as to the past . They mark out for the individual the proper path to a more complete actualization of personality and help reveal poorly developed parts of the personality .
Other Theories
In addition to the theories of Freud and Jung , there are a number of other theories , for example , those of Hall ( 1953 ), French ( 1954 ), Hadfield ( 1954 ), Boss ( 1953 ), Ullman ( 1955 ; 1958 ; 1959 ), and Jones ( 1962 ). These have several features in common . They deal more with the manifest than with the latent content , and they are more concerned with the dream as an expression having adaptive significance for the dreamer than as a disguise for infantile wishes . Hall , for example , regards the dream as a concrete representation of the dreamer ’ s conception of himself , of others , and of his world . The dream reveals more than it conceals . French stresses the integrative role played by the dream .
The dreamer is attempting to solve his emotional problems . Hadfield also sees the dream as problem-solving activity , and Ullman emphasizes the dream ’ s adaptive function . For Boss , an existential – phenomenological therapist , the dream is a confrontation experience in which the dreamer faces directly his own questions of existence as a unique experiencing self . In the most recent of these theoretical formulations , Jones describes the synthesizing function of the dream within the context of a developmental sequence of critical phases through which a person passes in growing up .
It would seem from these theories that the dream was a complex , multidimensional , multileveled phenomenon capable of supporting diverse theoretical superstructures . The dream may , in fact , be just such a complex phenomenon , although the ratio of research to speculation is still so small that it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions regarding the validity of these speculations . Although research is scanty , the usefulness of dream analysis in psycho-analytic and other forms of psychotherapy seems to be generally acknowledged by psychotherapists ( Bonime 1962 ).
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