ABSTRACT
In psychotherapy, significant dream images and dream figures represent significant parts of the personality, significant sub-personalities in fact. These images usually change – evolve – during the course of a mutative experience such as analysis. These sub-personalities can be interpreted as ways of experiencing the world or experiencing other people, but they can also be interpreted as behaviour tendencies. If the sub-personality is deemed to have a universal human behaviour or attitude as its basis, it is referred to as an archetype. Sub-personalities occur in pairs or in interacting groups. For example, a mother and infant pair, a father beats or chasing a child, a witch imprisoning and devouring a child or a pair of children, an oedipal triangle. Sub-personalities constitute emotionally charged underlying determinants of perception and behaviour. The property of becoming unveiled when consciousness is impaired is shared by all sub-personalities – archetypes, complexes and thoroughly learned behaviour.
