It is a psychology of the soul that goes beyond consciousness. All in all, we live in a very rational age today. This is not meant in a negative way. But one day or another, we all find ourselves in situations where our ego is lost, don’t we? Then a therapy that also includes irrational things like dreams can be very helpful. It considers the human being in its wholeness.

Dreams have helped me a lot in difficult situations. They have compensated for what was too one-sided in my conscious approach to life. The more I listened to my dreams, the more I actually dreamt.

I understand this apprehension well. The unconscious is such a vague thing. You don’t know what you’re going to come across when you get into contact with it. Therefore, it’s good to be careful.

When dealing with dreams, it is important to be accompanied. Certain nightmares, for example, can be very frightening, and often we would like to forget them right away. My task as an analyst is to sense how far a person’s contact with the unconscious is helpful and whether it is advisable for them to work with their dreams or not.

It depends very much on the client, of course.

If someone comes to the first session with several dreams that they would like to understand, we can go into dream interpretation right away.

Someone else might first need to be built up for a long moment. There might be no dreams in the beginning or they may only be included later.

This is all very individual.

Dream analysis is about relating a dream content to your very personal associations. What is bothering or tormenting you at the moment? What happened in the days before the dream? What do certain dream symbols trigger in you? By discussing questions like these, the meaning of many dreams can be revealed and bring relief in difficult situations.

Other dreams, however, can be very mysterious. They don’t show any connection with the tormenting problems. These are archetypal dreams. They present something very emotional, such as a monster unlike any you have seen before.

Jungian psychology is particularly suitable for the interpretation of archetypal dreams, because it is closely connected to mythology. In the myths of any era and culture there are all sorts of monsters. This knowledge must be consulted in order to understand how the archetype of the monster is represented in a dream.

As a Jungian analyst, I explore the archetypal elements in the motives of dreams because there is a strong healing power in them.

It is often surprising for analysands to discover how the individual and the archetypal realms are associated and how helpful insights in archetypal dreams can be in a difficult life situation.