In 1902, Jung had read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and On Dreams, and expressed his differences [in his dissertation and elsewhere]: dreams were not always wish fulfillments, they were frequently undisguised, the content of dreams was related to the state of consciousness, and if dreams presented wish fulfillments, these were by no means always infantile. These are among the precise charges that he would level against Freud’s dream theories, from around 1912 onwards, and represented positions from which he never subsequently moved away. (p. 133)

Though Jung never fully accepted Freud’s model, a true break occurred in 1909 when Jung had his famous dream of descending into the cellar of a medieval house and finding prehistoric bones and pottery. Jung had no patience with Freud’s simplistic interpretation that this indicated that Jung wanted his wife dead and buried. Jung later commented to British psychiatrist E.A.Bennet that “it was then, at that moment, I got the idea of the collective unconscious.” Jung realized that the dream was presenting him with a portrait of the unconscious strikingly different from Freud’s model: “namely that the dream was nature” (both quotes, p.138).It was not for many years, however, until his discovery of alchemical texts led him to his alchemical model of the psyche, that he found the full meaning of this pivotal dream.

Despite his misgivings, Jung kept his disagreement with Freud’s model to himself.F or example, rather disingenuously, in 1911, he wrote a highly partisan critique of Morton Prince’s article, “The Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams.” In this article, Prince argued that not all dreams were wish fulfilment.It wasn’t until the following year that Jung openly presented views that contradicted Freud’s, culminating in his first major book, Symbols of Transformation, which would lead to his excommunication from the psychoanalytic community.In the years to come, he tended to a single manner of presentation of his views on dreams: “first Freud, then Jung” (p.147).Though effective as a rhetorical device, it ignored the thinkers whose ideas on dreams had actually influenced him.F or example, in his 1928 revision of his paper “The Psychology of Dreams,” Jung contrasted the subjective and objective approaches to dream interpretation.F or the former, he presented the dream as a play in which the dreamer was “the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic” (CW 8, p.509, Shamdasani’s translation). This model had been presented as  early as 1885 by German philosopher Carl du Prel, with whose work Jung was familiar.

From 1912 on, Jung’s Zurich colleague Alphonse Maeder presented a series of papers in which he argued that dreams often compensated for our outer attitudes, thus serving a function similar to a thermostat: to restore equilibrium to the psyche. Maeder acknowledged Flournoy’s view that dreams also serve a teleological function, thus forcing the analyst to consider “a finalistic mode of considerations as a correlate to Freud’s causal mode” (p.142). Both ideas became central to Jung’s own model but went unacknowledged until 1928. In a letter, Maeder discussed Jung’s failures to cite colleagues: “Jung was, in his manner, as authoritarian as Freud. . . . He did not practice exchanges of viewpoint with his collaborators. He was very soon surrounded by admirers; finally he only had women around him, total admirers” (p.150). Shamdasani continues, saying that Maeder felt that “these failings [of attribution] were not particular to Jung, but afflicted the modern psychotherapy movement. . . . The absolutism, and ultimately the totalitarian pretension of each school was a compensation for inner uncertainty. The worship of the master resembled the characteristic hero worshipof our age, which he saw as a substitute for a lost relation to God” (both quotes, p.150, emphasis added).

We could suggest that if, in this area, as with psychological types, Jung did not always acknowledge the contributions of others that went into his model, it was Jung and Jung alone who was able to bring this multitude of ideas into a whole. More than any other psychologist of that or any other era, he tried mightily to balance both sides of every argument: the individual versus the collective, the causal versus the teleological. The whole he presented added up to more than the sum of its parts.