Dreams & the Subconscious

Lesson 1: The Structure of the Subconscious Mind - Overview

Components of the Psyche -- The Shadow

Shadow: At one time, when Jung was trying to teach his students what the shadow was, and they were becoming dogmatic or belaboring trivialities, he threw up his hands in frustration and said that all parts of ourselves we do not know is shadow. The shadow contains all the parts of ourselves that we have rejected or disowned. It will contain the parts we do not like – greed, jealousy, fear – and also much of the best of what we are – strength, talent, courage, self-love, beauty. These are the parts of ourselves that we stuffed away when we were criticized, laughed at, or denigrated in any way. A young boy who is jeered at for crying when he is hurt or a young girl who is told she isn’t worthy of love or respect will soon reject his or her vulnerability and stuff it away, thinking it gone forever.

But in truth, it recedes into the deep part of the psyche to become part of the shadow. In dreams, the shadow often appears as someone of the same sex as the dreamer, often with dark or exotic features. It may appear as armies. One woman dreamed that an army in the ancient dress of Scots warriors broke into her house and cut her lover’s throat. To analyze her dream, she would need to look at the warriors as shadow defenders. There was something definitely wrong with her lover especially since his throat was cut, which said that he tended to play fast and loose with the truth.

However, Jung would never have allowed her to stop there in her dream analysis. She would need to proceed further, after exploring the relationship more closely, to ask why she had attracted such a man into her life. In the dream, he had blue-black hair, and so I suggested she read the tale of Bluebeard and pay close attention to how she responded to the story both physically and emotionally. She would need to explore the relationship she had with her own animus, what some call the masculine soul of a woman, and find the hook within herself that had attracted such a man or she would continue to attract men like that (as she had for many years).

Eventually, through working on her own animus, she could evolve to a higher relationship with the masculine, both the one within her and the one without. As she continued to work with this dream and its negative masculine image, over time he would evolve in her dreams into a better masculine figure and eventually she would begin attracting to herself a different kind of man in her outer life.

In the next section, we will cover Animus and Anima,parental figures, and animals in dreams.

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