Dreams & the Subconscious

Lesson 1: The Structure of the Subconscious Mind - Overview

Components of the Psyche -- Ego and Self

The following are some of the components of your psyche. The persona and the ego are parts of the conscious mind. The rest are components of the unconscious mind.

Persona: The persona is the image we wear, the image we present to the world. For example, if at some times in our lives, we came to believe that our emotional self was a liability, we might construct an image we put to the world that is “cool”, or devoid of emotionality and the vulnerability that is its partner. Most Westerners try to live an acceptable persona thereby denying all the varied parts of our psyches. Jung warns us of the great danger we face when we try to live our personas.

Ego: Ego is a word that can have many meanings. In Eastern philosophy, it is considered the source of all that is negative in a human being – greed, savagery, selfishness, cruelty. In a broader sense, the ego is not only an important part of our conscious self – who we think ourselves to be – but it is a very necessary part of the conscious structure. In its healthiest sense, the ego may be seen as a “sorter” which determines what needs to be consciously accessed and what doesn’t. Having a strong ego is necessary for human mental health.

A person with a weak to non-existent ego is one whose conscious mind is swamped with images and experiences from the unconscious mind without the capacity to discern the intrusions from what is real in the physical world and what is not. In other words, the person is insane. Yet, if the ego is too strong, if it thinks it is all there is to the psyche, then the person is in danger of having eruptions from the unconscious mind into daily life – moods, piques of anger, projections of personal unconscious contents onto other human beings, and sometimes sheer brutal violence. The religious leader who believes and teaches that various forms of sexuality are evil may find himself skulking off to the red light district in the dark of night, unable to stop himself.

When you appear in your dream as yourself, you represent your ego self, called the dream ego, and all that happens to you and around you is a drama constructed to reveal how your unconscious mind sees your ego’s conscious relationship to your psychic whole.

Self, with a capital S: The Self is your source of psychic wholeness. You might say that it is the face of God or Goddess that is tailored for you; it is the face of your Authentic Self. The Self may appear in a dream as a Divine Being or it may take on a certain shape such as a sphere or a circle which Jung called a mandala. The Self may appear as a guiding star. In fact, Dr. Jung believed that the dream was a construction of the Divine Self.

Wisdom: In dreams, the wise old man or the wise old woman may appear. It may be someone you know or someone you do not know. It may be a popular person or figure from history who was known for being very wise.

Study of the shadow part of the psyche will continue in the next lesson.

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