On Constructing Our Own Reality

Abstract

Between November 1928 and June 1930, at the Zurich Psychological Club, Jung gave a series of weekly seminars on dream analysis, covering thirty dreams during the course of the seminars. Over fifty of his patients and colleagues attended one or another of these seminars. Happily, a number of those attending transcribed the seminars; these have now been edited and are available as Dream Analysis(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). As always, Jung's extemporaneous remarks are filled with insights not found in the more formal works. To give just a tiny sample, first on the shadow: The collective unconscious is not a psychological function in your head, it is the shadow side of the object itself. As our conscious personality is a part of the visible world, so our shadow side is a body in the collective unconscious, it is the unknown in things. So everything that possibly can gets at you through the shadow.