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The Dreams of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung

We analyzed 28 dreams from Sigmund Freud and 31 from Carl Jung. The dream reports were culled from Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and On Dreams (1901), and from Jung's Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1963).

Some interesting results show up in the h-profile below:

  • Both men had similar Familiarity Percents, but Jung's Friends Percent was much lower than Freud's. This suggests that Jung dreamed primarily of his family and relatives.
  • Their A/C Indexes -- aggressions per character -- were similar (and somewhat below the male norms) but Freud had very little physical aggression in his dreams; most of it was verbal or covert.
  • Freud and Jung were equally likely to have initiated aggression in their dreams, but Jung was by far more likely to initiate friendliness.
  • Freud had less failure in his dreams than did Jung, and when he was involved in striving situations, he was far above the male norms in ending up successful.
  • There were not an unusual number of misfortunes in Freud's dreams, but when they occurred they were disproportionately bodily misfortunes. Interestingly, though, those bodily misfortunes were usually suffered by someone other than Freud. (This last tidbit is not shown on the h-profile.)
H-profile of Freud and Jung Compared to the Male Norms

For information about other coding categories, and for a discussion of these results in the context of what is known about Freud and Jung's personalities, see Chapter 8 of Bill Domhoff's Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach.


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