Compensation
Category: Psychology
The Automatic Mechanism That Restores Psychic Balance
Compensation is the most basic function dreams have in Jungian psychology. When consciousness leans too far in one direction, the unconscious puts the opposite content into a dream and tries to bring the whole psyche back into balance. Someone carrying excessive confidence through the day may dream of failing or being humiliated; someone whose self-regard is extremely low may find themselves praised in a dream. The premise here differs from Freud's claim that a dream is wish fulfillment: the dream is treated as something that maintains the equilibrium of the psyche. Restoring balance, though, doesn't mean the dream hands you the right answer. Pointing out the direction of the imbalance is as far as the dream goes. What you do about it is left to the waking judgment of the person who dreamed it.
The Decisive Difference from Freud's Wish Fulfillment
Freud saw a dream as a disguised fulfillment of a wish that repression had pushed out of sight. Jung's compensation theory takes a step past that view. Compensatory dreams are not necessarily pleasant. If anything, the more unpleasant a dream is, the more strongly it is read as reflecting a side of things consciousness has been missing. A dream of collapse while you're basking in success; a dream of loneliness while your relationships are going well. Neither is a wish coming true. Both can be read as holding out a risk or a feeling that consciousness has not been looking at. Filing an unpleasant dream away as a bad omen therefore throws away the very clue it offered. Swap in the question of what your life is short on right now, and the same dream turns into material you can use.
How Far Consciousness Leans Changes How the Dream Comes Out
Jung explained that the way a dream comes out shifts with how one-sided the conscious attitude is. When consciousness leans hard to one side, the dream shows something close to the opposite position, which is what happens when an overconfident person dreams of humiliation. When the conscious attitude sits in a roughly reasonable place, the dream doesn't oppose it head-on; it appears as a variation on that attitude or as a small correction, such as a minor obstacle turning up in response to a slightly over-optimistic plan. And when the direction consciousness is heading in fits the situation, the dream reads more like a confirmation of it. These three ways of coming out carry no fixed names, so there is nothing to memorize. It's more useful in practice to first estimate how far your current attitude is leaning, then set that estimate against what the dream showed. If the dream confronts you with the exact opposite, read it as a signal that the lean is a large one.
Reading Compensation Patterns with a Dream Journal
To make use of compensation, you need to record not just what the dream contained but your psychological state that day. Add a line for yesterday's mood and events to your dream journal and set it beside the dream. If you spoke forcefully in a meeting yesterday and dreamed the next morning of losing your voice, the unconscious may be compensating for overconfidence. Looking back over a week of entries brings out which direction your consciousness tends to lean and how the unconscious goes about restoring balance. One caution: don't settle on a verdict about your own bias from a single night. It's when dreams pointing the same way keep recurring that reading them as compensation becomes worthwhile.
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