Inner Work

Robert A. Johnson

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061959615
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

From Robert A. Johnson, the bestselling author of Transformation, Owning Your Own Shadow, and the groundbreaking works He, She, and We, comes a practical four-step approach to using dreams and the imagination for a journey of inner transformation. In Inner Work, the renowned Jungian analyst offers a powerful and direct way to approach the inner world of the unconscious, often resulting in a central transformative experience. A repackaged classic by a major name in the field, Robert Johnson's Inner Work enables us to find extraordinary strengths and resources in the hidden depths of our own subconscious.

II. DREAM WORK

Approaching Dream Work

Since this book is intended to give a direct, practical approach to dream work, we will not spend much time talking about theories. However, there are some concepts and terms used in Jungian dream analysis that are very useful for orienting us to the world of dreams. Since they will come up from time to time, we will take the opportunity to discuss them now. Then we will go through the practical steps in order to learn how to use them.

A good starting point is to look at an actual dream, which we can then use to illustrate some of the basic ideas. This is the dream of a young professional woman who leads a very busy life. The dream is short and simple, on the surface, but it had a powerful impact on the dreamer.

The Renegade Dream

I am looking for my car keys. I realize my husband has them. Then I remember that my brother has borrowed my car and has not returned it. I see both of them and I call to them. They do not seem to hear me. Then a disheveled young man, like a “renegade,” gets into my car and drives off. I feel extremely frustrated, helpless, and somewhat abandoned.

For her work on this dream, the dreamer began with two basic principles: First, the basic function of dreams is to express the unconscious. She realized, therefore, that the dream was expressing something that existed within her at the unconscious level. Second, she knew that the images in the dream should not be taken literally but as symbols of parts of herself and dynamics within her inner life. She did both dream work and Active Imagination with the characters in her dream. This was the basic interpretation that resulted:

Because of the spontaneous associations she made in her mind with her husband and brother, she felt that they represented the part of herself that needed to be quiet, meditative, and centered within herself. She saw that she was so busy with her extroverted professional life that she had no time for home, family, and the quiet time that kept her centered. She had been taking on more than she could handle, teaching classes as well as carrying a big work load. She was overworked, edgy, unable to find time to be alone or to be with her husband. She said yes to every request, agreed to join in every project.

The car represented to her this overinvolvement. That pattern felt like a “vehicle” that she entered and that ran away with her. Like the car, the pattern was mechanical, a product of collective society, and somehow out of her control. She felt as though something had pushed her into the car, turned the switch, and “drove away” with her into another project, another involvement.

She associated the other masculine figure, the “renegade” who drove the car away, with the part of herself that always wanted to be in high gear, that was saying yes to everything, that loved to turn on the ignition and charge off in the collective circles. He was like a wild person who couldn’t stand to sit still or be quiet. The dreamer felt split between the side of life represented by her husband and brother and the side represented by the renegade.

In response to this dream, she made some drastic changes in her schedule. She cut down her involvements in the world outside, gave herself more time to be with her family, be quiet, and do inner work. There was an immediate sense of relief as her energy was focused on the aspects of life that were most important to her.

This dream illustrates several basic principles that will help us. First, an important point: Even a short, seemingly insignificant dream tries to tell us something that we need to know. Dreams never waste our time. If we take the trouble to listen to the “little” dreams, we find that they carry important messages.

Who are these characters who populate our dreams? What is it in our inner structure that is represented by figures like the husband, the brother, the renegade? For this woman, we have seen that the husband’s image represented something distinct from her literal, physical husband—something within her own inner being. In this dream, his image represented a life-principle at work within her, a set of values, an inner sense of what way of life was most true to her essential character.

The multiplicity of dream figures reflects the plurality and multidimensional structure of the inner self. We are all made up of many personalities or inner “persons,” coexisting within one mind and one body. We think of ourselves as one individual, with one single viewpoint on life, but actually, if we pay attention, we have to admit that it feels as though there were several people living somewhere deep inside, each pulling in a different direction.

Dreams show us, in symbolic form, all the different personalities that interact within us and make up our total self. In the Renegade Dream, the dreamer found several aspects of herself represented by the images of husband, brother, and renegade. One part of her wants to stay at home, tend the garden, meditate, and enjoy her family. One part wants to do good work in her profession. Another part of her wants to go out and save the world, charge off with the “renegade” into endless crusades and “good works.” The “renegade” part of her, in fact, seems to be a slightly disheveled manifestation of the archetypal hero living within her. By showing her all this, the dream makes it clear she must find a balance among all these opposing urges and values.

Jung observed that each of our psychological components is a distinct center of consciousness. We can think of them as structures within ourselves that make up our total psyche. We can see them as independent energy systems that combine in us, for they are autonomous: Each has its own consciousness, its own values, desires, and points of view. Each leads us in a different direction; each has a different strength or quality to contribute to our lives; and each has its own role in our total character.

This is why they often feel as though they were independent people living on the inside. It is appropriate that they are symbolized as persons in our dreams.

Often when we think that we are trying to make a decision based on facts or logic, we are actually caught in a battle between terrible forces inside us. Since it is mostly unconscious, and we don’t know who fights for what, we can’t make peace. We don’t know which side to take. We feel ourselves hopelessly split between opposing forces.

Here is a woman in a novel by a contemporary writer, divided within as she faces her seducer:

“Then we can travel together,” he explained, as if this were the solution both of them had been working towards.

She said nothing at all. Inside her it was as if each component of her nature had gone to war against the other: the child fought the mother, the tart fought the nun…

(LeCarre, Little Drummer Girl, Step Two: Dynamics)

Who is this child who fights the mother, this tart who fights the nun? What of the man whose inner hero wants to storm castles and quest for the Holy Grail while his inner monk wants to stay quiet in his cell and contemplate the divine mystery? We might say that these represent human possibilities, aspects of human character that are common to us all.

Here we encounter the archetypes: the universal patterns or tendencies in the human unconscious that find their way into our individual psyches and form us. They are actually the psychological building blocks of energy that combine together to create the individual psyche. Here are the type of the child, the type of the mother, the universal virgin, and the universal tart, all flowing through the personality of one individual.

In our dreams, they join the archetypal hero or heroine, the priest, the scoundrel. Each of them adds a different richness to our character and has a different truth to tell. Each represents our own, individual version of the universal forces that combine to create a human life.

The inner self is not only plural: Jung found that the psyche manifests itself as an androgyny, containing both feminine and masculine energies. Every man needs to connect the “masculine” ego to the side of his psyche that the unconscious sees as his “feminine” side. Each woman’s feminine ego needs to make a synthesis with the symbolically “masculine” side of her total self.

The psyche spontaneously divides itself into pairs of opposites. All the archetypal energies in us appear to the conscious mind as complementary pairs: yin and yang, feminine and masculine, dark and light, positive and negative. Part of me lives in the conscious mind, and part of me—the complementary quality that completes the whole—is hidden in the unconscious. The unconscious constantly uses the masculine-feminine dichotomy to symbolize the interplay of the inner forces that must balance and complete one another. They may appear as hostile opposites, deadly enemies, yet they are destined to make a synthesis, for they are two facets of one stream of energy.

Figures of the opposite sex often appear in dreams to symbolize the energy systems that are the farthest from the ego, farthest from the conscious mind, deep in the unconscious of the dreamer. It is impossible to predict for a particular woman or man what inner parts will be represented by an image of the opposite sex. It depends on the individual, but some common patterns are clear and useful to know.

Men have been traditionally conditioned in our culture to identify with the thinking and organizing side of life, to be heroes and doers. The unconscious often chooses a feminine figure, therefore, to represent a man’s emotional nature, his capacity for feeling, appreciating beauty, developing values, and relating through love. These are the capacities that in many men live mostly in the unconscious. Their appearance in a man’s dream in feminine imagery signals his need to make them conscious, expand the narrow focus of his “masculine” ego-life.

The ego structure of many women is identified mostly with feeling, relatedness, nurturing, and mothering—qualities that are traditionally thought of as “feminine.” The feminine side of the psyche is also rational, but it uses feeling-logic, the rational processes that are based on feeling, on sensing fine differentiations of values. It “knows” by a different mode than does the masculine side—by sensing the whole rather than by analyzing. Women’s dreams therefore often use masculine figures to represent the other side of the psyche—thinking-logic, knowing by analyzing and differentiating, classifying, organizing, competing, wielding power. A woman may find that many of her attitude principles, such as her ideas about religion, philosophy, and politics, will be generated from the side of her psyche that is represented by masculine figures.

The most important aspect of the androgynous psyche is the soul-image. In every man and woman there is an inner being whose primary function in the psyche is to serve as the psychopomp—the one who guides the ego to the inner world, who serves as mediator between the unconscious and the ego.

Jung became aware of the soul-image when he sensed a feminine presence within himself who pulled him toward the unconscious, who embodied the part of himself that lived in the realm of dream and imagination. When she appeared in his dreams, he found she was a creature of mythical quality, seemingly magical and half-divine. Like Beatrice, in the Divine Comedy of Dante, she led him to the inner world of the unconscious and served as his guide there. He found the same archetypal feminine presence in other men. He also observed a corresponding masculine soul-image in the dreams and lives of women.

Jung felt that this inner person corresponds to the traditional religious conception of the soul as an inner part of ourselves that connects us to the spiritual realm and leads us to God, so he referred to the feminine soul-image in men as anima and to the masculine soul-image in women as animus. Anima and animus are Latin words for soul.

It is important to be aware of the soul-images. They appear regularly in our dreams and play a tremendous role in our development as individuals. They affect the entire course of our lives.

Both as energies within us and as powerful symbols, the soul-images are tremendous forces to be reckoned with. All our inborn desire for unity and meaning, our desire to bring the opposing parts of ourselves together, to go to the unconscious and explore the inner world, to find religious experience, is concentrated in these inner beings who are the mediators between our egos and the vast unconscious. If we don’t interact with the anima or animus in our inner work, we inevitably project them into areas of our lives where they don’t belong.

For example, a man may project his anima into his job and become obsessive with it, making his work into an inferior channel for his religious life. A woman may project her animus onto an external man and fall in love not so much with the human being but with the soul-image that she has projected onto him. The whole basis of the romantic fantasy that so often sabotages ordinary human love is the projection of a man’s anima onto a woman or a woman’s animus onto an external man. In this way people try to complete themselves through another human being, try to live out the unconscious, unrealized parts of themselves through the external person on whom they put the romantic projection.

In the introduction I spoke of the process of individuation. As you know, individuation is a movement toward consciousness of the total inner self. Using our dreams as models, we can see that individuation also consists to a great extent in bringing the different inner persons within us together in a synthesis. Individuation is not only becoming conscious of these inner energy systems, it is also bringing relatedness and unity among them.

The end product of this evolution is something we can sense, feel, and describe intuitively even though we have not yet attained it—the sense of wholeness, of being completed. The wholeness of our total being, and our consciousness of the quality of wholeness, is expressed in an archetype. Jung called this archetype the self.

The self is the principle of integration. It is also the whole—the entire person. When a symbol of the self appears in a dream, it represents not only the totality of our being, but also our potential capacity for the highest consciousness—the awareness of unity in ourselves and in the cosmos.

Dreams constantly record the process of individuation and the movement of the ego toward the self. In most dreams we see an immediate, local situation in our lives. But, at the same time, if you collect your dreams together and see them in the aggregate, they report the stages along the way in the journey toward the self.

The self has characteristic symbols: The circle, the mandala (a circle divided into four parts), the square, and the diamond are all abstract figures that express the ar...