The Language of the Unconscious: Jung, Symbols, and Dream Interpretation
by Ina RH
Symbolic language is a way in which the unconscious communicates with the conscious mind. However, although this indirect language shapes our personality, the effort to translate it loses out to the competition with the pressing demands of everyday life. In ordinary communication, there is no distinction between symbols and signs, but for Jung, it is of extreme importance.
A sign is a non-symbolic language that we can easily understand. Signs appear on streets to coordinate traffic, in mathematics to express reasoning, and in designs that represent a brand so they can be promptly recognised in association with a product. On the other hand, a symbol has an in-depth importance. Unlike a sign, a symbol is not designed or immediately understood. It is created spontaneously as universal truths across all times and cultures. Symbols can provide existential, cosmic, social, transcendent and mythological layers of meaning.
Behind every symbol lies an archetype, the invisible universal pattern that the symbol makes visible.
Metaphorically, it is like saying that the lightbulb is the symbol and electricity is the archetype. In Archetypes and Collective Unconscious, Jung explains that archetypes live in deep layers of the unconscious called the Collective Unconscious. This in-depth layer sits below the personal unconscious, in which layers are more superficial and associated with the complexes of the individual psyche. Furthermore, in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung traces the term "archetype" back to Philo Judaeus (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE), noting connections to Greek philosophy (particularly Plato), Jewish thought, and early Christianity. Philo was among the first to use the word, linking it to the idea of the image of God (Imago Dei).
For instance, an archaic object such as the double adzes or labrys was found in many locations, including Minoan Crete, ancient Anatolia, Greece, Mesopotamia, and other cultures with limited contact. Unlike a sign, whose meaning is immediately legible, the deeper significance of the double axe is not self-evident from its form alone. Yet archaeology studies have indicated a transcendent meaning rooted in the archetypal, pointing toward what many cultures understood as sacred.
Existential archetypes of death, birth, life, cycles and transformation can relate to primordial elements such as earth, water, air and fire, and are expressed through primordial symbols such as the serpent. Some social human experiences are archetypal and create symbols embodied in objects such as a crown, ring and throne, which carry layered meanings around human power, divine authority and social order. Mythic personifications are archetypes expressed through personas such as the hero, the wise old man, the trickster, and the great mother. These archetypes carry their own primordial symbols and elements. For example, an image of the Great Mother would draw on natural elements like earth and water to evoke fertility, protection, and nourishment.
According to Jung, people can produce symbols unconsciously and spontaneously in the form of dreams.
The symbols in dreams can be archetypal from the collective unconscious or carry personal meaning associated with unconscious content related to their life. Jung has emphasised that, unfortunately, dreams are difficult for the conscious mind to understand. Because dreams are a language of the unconscious, most of this communication is lost as we tend to discard things we don’t understand. This is partly why some scientists have dismissed the existence of the unconscious.
In Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle, Jung argues that in science, only results that fall within the confidence interval and are statistically significant are considered, while random outliers are not further investigated. He suggested that a similarly dismissive approach is applied by mainstream science to dream interpretation. In this regard, the scientific method is not a framework for working with dreams, since dreams are a spontaneous phenomenon and cannot be controlled or reproduced.
To understand how the unconscious came to be studied, it is worth tracing the early attempts to incorporate it into scientific thinking. An attempt to incorporate psychology into the scientific method began with the philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart in 1825. Herbart pioneered the concept of the unconscious and attempted to explain the mind mechanism based on Newtonian mechanics. In his system, the conscious mind was a gatekeeper in which ideas, sensations and stimuli called representations, competing for conscious attention through forces of attraction or inhibition. Representations that are compatible, familiar, and harmonious would win in a force dynamic and be attracted to the conscious mind. On the other hand, ideas that are unfamiliar or conflicting would be lost in memory and therefore, inhibited by the consciousness and sent to the unconscious. These “materials” that were pushed to the unconscious would be retained and continuously influence conscious thought and behaviour. Although this framework has highly influenced Freud’s theories, the unconscious material was not treated as a rich and mysterious realm full of information, as later proposed by Freud and Jung. Later cognitive-behavioural approaches similarly acknowledged the unconscious without engaging with it directly, much like Herbart's framework.
One of the core topics in “science of the unconscious” is dissociation. Since 1880, dissociation has been widely discussed in relation to the effects of unconsciousness on behaviour. This mental state, called dissociation, is the separation of reality awareness from a person’s conscious mind or, in severe trauma, from their normal personality. A mild or “dreamlike” state is the most common state people experience. Jung highlights that our minds are limited in the perception of reality, and we tend to dissociate during the day.
A popular example is when we are driving, our responses are automatic, and at the end of the journey, we can’t recall the path. Another classic one is when walking into a room looking for something and forgetting what we were after. Jung, in Man and His Symbols, provides the example of a man walking and chatting with a friend around a farm, when a childhood memory surfaced unexpectedly, without any connection to the topic of conversation. He had to stop and return to the point where the thought started, and when he arrived at the spot, he noticed a particular goose smell triggered an unconscious association. This story illustrates that a chain of hidden associations and perceptions can be a trigger or sometimes distort reality.
How many times do we remember random things and ask ourselves: Why am I thinking about this right now?
All these examples show that the unconscious layer operates independently in our psyche, and the more we communicate with this layer, the more we become conscious and are guided by that awareness. In other words, according to Jung, "By understanding the unconscious we free ourselves from its domination." Based on this understanding, Jung dedicated a substantial part of his work to the study of dream interpretation as an important area in psychotherapy, towards healing the split.
Jung could not have agreed more with a well-said quote from Rav Ḥisda, a Babylonian Talmud sage of about 1,700 years ago, “A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read."
The archetypes exist in our minds before conscious thoughts and can have a powerful influence on our perceptions and experiences. In the psychology of Jungian dream interpretation, dreams are unique and carry meaningful functions that can provide relevant information to the individual. Jung’s use of dreams as therapeutic lessons differs completely from Freud's, and this difference is one of the key points of divergence between Jung and Freud.
Freud developed the free association technique, in which individuals would recount a dream and were encouraged to make associations with its key elements. This process would leave the dream's meaning behind and focus instead on the buried complex it pointed toward. In Man and His Symbols, Jung mentioned that began to doubt the use of dreams to uncover complexes when a colleague recounted an experience from a long train journey through Russia. Unable to read the Cyrillic script on the railway signs, the colleague began making free associations with the unfamiliar letters and ended up surfacing unpleasant childhood memories. This episode gave Jung an important insight: dreams are not necessary for the free association process, and the dream itself has its own specific function. This function is lost when the method diverges from its meaning and lands on a complex.
For Freud, symbols in dreams are disguised, suppressed desires that are too controversial to be expressed literally to the dreamer. For instance, a man spoke of a dream in which a drunk and vulgar woman seemed to be his wife, in real life. The dreamer immediately discarded this hypothesis as it did not make sense to him. As opposed to Freud, Jung did not apply the well-known psychoanalytic technique of free association, which would diverge from the dream, and therapy would shift to a potential discussion about the mother complex, ending up in neurotic symptoms.
For Freud, symbols in dreams are disguised, suppressed desires that are too controversial to be expressed literally to the dreamer. For instance, a man spoke of a dream in which a drunk and vulgar woman seemed to be his wife, in real life. The dreamer immediately discarded this hypothesis as it did not make sense to him. As opposed to Freud, Jung did not apply the well-known psychoanalytic technique of free association, which would diverge from the dream, and therapy would shift to a potential discussion about the mother complex, ending up in neurotic symptoms.
Freud would interpret the female figure as something repressed by the man that was disguised as a chaotic woman. In Jung’s interpretation, it would be a waste not to discuss with the patient about his anima, the feminine aspect of the patient’s personality that would be revealing.
For Jung, this dream felt true to the patient as a message saying that a balance in his personality was needed, nothing moral, but the man's undeveloped or neglected feminine side was manifesting destructively. According to Jung, dreams carry a unique expression, and they should be interpreted in conjunction with the patient, never through the lens of a specialist's preconceptions.
For instance, Jung mentioned in Man and His Symbols, that if a patient tells Freud a dream of a man who was trying to insert a key in a lock and ended up breaking down a door using a stick, Freud will see it as a sexual symbology repressed by the individual. For Jung, it would be more important to explore why a stick was preferred over a key. While a key in a lock would disguise male and female genitals for Freud, for Jung, the same symbology can be interpreted with a different meaning.
In Man and His Symbols, Jung collected a Flemish Christian art dated from the 15th century, as a symbol of hope, in which the key represented desire for God and the lock represented charity. In this regard, the meaning of symbols is not fixed and can differ from one person to another based on their living experiences and, therefore, their unique unconscious material.
From a therapeutic perspective, psychodynamic work offers one pathway toward this integration. But perhaps Jung's important insight is simpler than any technique: that the unconscious is not a faulty part to be managed, but a guide waiting to be heard and that the first step is simply learning to listen.
References
Jung, C. G. (1979). Man and his symbols. Picador.
Corey, G. (2023). Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. (Eleventh edition.). Cengage.
Collin, C., Wilkins, J., Grand, V., Lazyan, M., Weeks, M., & Forsyth, E. (2012). The psychology book. Dorling Kindersley.
Kim, A., Landerer, C., & Huemer, W. (2024). Johann Friedrich Herbart. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2024 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/johann-herbart/
Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed.). Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Jung, C. G. (1969). Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., Vol. 8). Princeton University Press.
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