Savinja Gurung
Mrs. Cheatham
English 100
Feb 10, 2015 Critical Analysis of Carl Jung’s “The Importance of Dreams” Jung, one of the most important and most complex psychological theorist of all time, holds the belief that dreams are symbols of human unconsciousness. He finds the very intimate relationship between symbol, unconsciousness and dreams. In his essay “ The Importance of Dreams”, Jung describes that man produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the forms of dreams. He says that dreams are outlet of unconsciousness. He describes that how human incompetence to define and inability to explain certain things which is beyond human reasoning always expressed using different varieties of symbols such as natural symbols, cultural symbols and religious symbols. Jung’s idea is valid because things beyond the range of human understanding stores unconsciously without our conscious knowledge in human psyche which is revealed to us in a dream as a symbolic image. Jung believes that human unconsciousness exists and it expresses itself through our dreams using symbolic language. He asserts that “whoever denies the existence of the unconsciousness is in fact assuming that our present knowledge of the psyche is total. And this belief is clearly just as false as the assumption that we know all there is to be known about the natural universe” (192). Jung is right here because human race doesn’t know all about the natural universe. Human psyche is part of nature and nature is limitless and infinite. Thus defining nature and psyche is just the belief that human describes and explains any psychic events as best as it can be but that is not the whole truth. As it is well known that human minds never perceive anything completely and this inability to comprehend limits human understanding about universe or world. Even those scientific and technological advancement at some point has its limits or certain boundaries that conscious knowledge cannot pass. More over every concrete objects is always unknown in certain respects that makes conscious knowledge harder to perceive the ultimate nature of matter itself. So the inability to comprehend the ultimate essence of any matter, event and experience by conscious knowledge becomes store as an unconsciousness factors of human psyche that appears as some kind of symbols. Hence human being has dreams that express those repressed unconsciousness aspect of conscious psyche in the form of different symbols.. Jung goes further and states that “ dreams are the most frequent and universally accessible sources for the investment of man’s symbolizing faculty”( 193) . As it is already clarified earlier in the essay that human repressed unconsciousness of conscious mind is expressed through different symbols, so dreams are not just a matter of chance but are associated with conscious human’s thoughts and problems. Jung as talks about human unconsciousness, there are individual unconsciousness and collectiveness. Individual unconsciousness is composed of past memories and experiences which have been repressed, as well as memories that are unimportant and have simply been dropped from conscious awareness. Whereas collective unconsciousness contents and images appear to be shared with people of all time periods and all cultures. For example water is symbol of transparency in many culture. The sign of peace and swastika is shared same meaning in several cultures. Life and death, light and darkness are also shared the common or universal collective experiences. Thus there are so many symbols that represents universally the unconsciousness mind of all human psyche. The history of psychoanalytical practice proves the fact that , it was the study of dreams that first enabled psychologist to investigate the unconscious aspect of conscious psychic events. So the pattern of expressing our problems and troubles often through our dreams using different symbols has exists