According to Jung, dreams are compensatory...?

"In my experience [dreams] always stress the other side in order to maintain the psychic equilibrium."

"Dreams are the compensators of consciousness." 

"I have often pointed out that the function of dreams is above all compensatory."

(Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, par. 170, 489, and 501.)

When I began studying C.G. Jung, I was surprised by his, as I understood it, rather superficial understanding of dreams. As we know, Jung is anything but superficial and has no trouble admitting difficulties with understanding the psychology of the unconscious, but when it comes to dreams, he always returns to their compensatory function. (This is mentioned in 38 different places in his collected works, according to its index.) I got the impression that Jung's view of dreams was—like Freud's—a “nothing but.” This seriously clashed with my emerging understanding of Jung and his theories in general.

While Jung, unlike Freud, never wrote the great “dream interpretation book,” instead settling for occasional, fairly short essays, he constantly returns to dreams in his writings. Dreams are a phenomenon that clearly occupies a very central place in his theory formation. At the same time, he seemed to settle for their compensatory function.

Note that I am describing my impression of Jung's psychology after reading, let’s say, three or four books by him. Since I myself had always been interested in dreams, I was troubled by his—as I perceived it—one-sided emphasis on the compensatory nature of dreams.

Why did Jung insist on this apparently simplified view of this multifaceted and endlessly varied phenomenon? I believe there are two reasons for this. On the one hand, the compensation theory hides an unexpected depth when you scratch the surface; on the other hand, Jung tends to present a simplified, more digestible, version of his theories in his “official” essays, those that make up the majority of his collected works.

When I discovered Jung as a nineteen year old in Sweden, there was very little literature by him available. Besides Man and His Symbols and his autobiography, only the two essays I quote from above were available. Raising my gaze to my bookshelf as I write, I now see, alongside books from his collected works, ten or so volumes of seminars, a few books of letters, and not least the Red Book—together a treasure that was, without exaggeration, unthinkable for my, say, twenty-year-old self. My view of Jung's conception of dreams has deepened and broadened considerably as the decades have passed, in other words. It is still true that Jung holds fast to his compensation theory, but it is clear that it is not as one-sided as my first impression suggested.

Jung says in one of the quotes above that dreams “always stress the other side in order to maintain the psychic equilibrium.” This is very central to Jung's theory, that the psyche as a whole, like the body, autonomously strives for balance. In the Visions Seminar, he says: "These two concepts [Yin and Yang], which the Western mind can hardly grasp, are exceedingly suitable to explain the basic principles of our psychology." (p. 355.) When I attended a course in Jungian psychology led by what was for a long time Sweden’s only Jungian analyst, Stina Thyberg, she used only one image during the four or five evenings the course lasted—the taijitu symbol, with the black and white fields in dynamic relationship to one another. The two forces compensate for and balance each other.

The more one-sided the ego becomes, the more sharply the unconscious takes an opposing stance. This manifests to a greater or lesser extent in the shadow, which by definition is the opposite of our identity. We see the same dynamic in anima and animus: because the ego of a man is masculine, the representative of the (collective) unconscious becomes feminine, and vice versa. The unconscious is always in a compensatory relationship to the conscious. Jung argues that this autonomous dynamic is reflected in our dreams. However, the risk is that one takes "compensation" literally, as I did, and for that reason does not discover this dynamic in one’s own dreams.

Elsewhere, I have recounted the time I lay aimlessly on a mattress in a friend's kitchen, homeless and unemployed, and had a wonderful little dream of new growth, and a guiding woman who told me that everything was as it should be. The dream is compensatory, as it corrects my ego’s confusion and worry. The woman, of course, also turned out to be right. Another, more common example is being chased by something. That which chases contains an opposing, compensatory attitude in relation to the ego.

In the seminar Children’s Dreams, Jung proposes four types of dreams: the unconscious's reaction to a conscious situation; a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious; the unconscious's effort to change the conscious attitude; and dreams that reflect an unconscious process that has no relation to consciousness.

The first three categories can, of course, be compensatory, but they can also operate within another definition Jung used, namely that dreams are a “spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious” (”General Aspects of Dream Psychology,” par. 505), and he adds elsewhere that dreams “are natural phenomena which are nothing other than what they pretend to be.” He further states, distancing himself from Freud: “They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise, but naïvely announce what they are and what they mean.” (”Analytical Psychology and Education,” par. 189.)

I believe that Jung had difficulty defining dreams because he was intensely aware of how multifaceted the phenomenon is. Both Freud and Adler—who together with Jung were considered "the three greats" within depth psychology—had relatively simple and easily explained theories. Jung, on the other hand, tended to waver. In seminars and other more or less private contexts, he often returned to the idea that his theories were hypotheses, that concepts like the Self are fundamentally indefinable, that it is unclear where the unconscious begins and ends, and so on. These uncertainties are inherent in the nature of the subject, and Jung was capable of managing and containing the intrinsic ambiguity and contradictions of the unconscious.

However, he was a contemporary of Freud and Adler, and other atheistic, rationalist intellectuals who functioned well within the prevailing materialism of the time. If Freud argued that dreams were wish fulfillments and Adler that dreams reflect an individual's external challenges, I guess Jung too had to be able to express what dreams meant in just a few words. I actually believe that this is the background to why he asserted that dreams are compensatory—but I also believe that, for practical reasons, he did so against his better judgment. When Jung, in a seminar, discusses the structure of the unconscious in a fairly intricate way, he interrupts himself with: “I am sorry if this is too damned obscure.” (Jung’s Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, p. 133.) I believe that this is, so to speak, where Jung ends up if he is entirely honest with his knowledge and experience on the subject. But he does not win academic points or even particularly many students with such honesty.

I therefore think that Jung repeated his compensation theory to provide a simple and accessible way to define his view of the function of dreams, but also because the compensatory relationship of the unconscious to the conscious is, according to Jung, a fact. Finally, I also believe that “compensation” as a definition risks standing in the way of a deeper understanding of how Jung viewed and worked with dreams. While the answer to the question “Are dreams compensatory?” is “Yes,” one would want to add: “But…”