The Inner Child in Dreams

Kathrin Asper

Newsletter, Vol. 17, No. 8, Summer 1992

The Inner Child in Dreams. By Kathrin Asper. (Boston: Shambala Publications, 1992, 148 pages.)

With Sharon E. Rooks translation of Swiss analyst Kathrin Asper’s book, Von der Kindheit zum Kind in uns (Walter-Verlag AG, Olten, 1988), English-speaking readers are now able to avail themselves of a major contribution to the literature on the inner child. Rich in clinical material and consistent in approach and expression with its subject, The Inner Child in Dreams lives up to, may even exceed, the expectations of those of us who have heard its author lecture.

Approaching her subject as a therapist, Asper, who in addition to her practice serves as a training analyst and lecturer at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, offers a number of original insights which a less discerning observer would have been tempted to turn into an intellectual system. Just how open and respectful Asper is to the phenomenon of dreaming, for example, is represented by the following passage:

The point is to show readers the beauty and the often astonishing meaningfulness of dreams and to encourage them to reflect on their own dreams with complete freedom. I intentionally say ‘with complete freedom’ because I think that working with dreams should be carried out in an atmosphere free from constraint, free from the persistent intention of getting something palpable, concete, and useful out of the dream.

In other words, the very qualities which are being advocated in dream work (or play) involve a good relation to the inner child or the child archetype. Yet the extent to which this is possible depends in large measure on whether each of us has accepted and integrated our own experiences of childhood. Most of the case studies included in Asper’s study involve the working through of childhood deprivation, or more importantly, what continues to be regarded as deprivation, the reductive phase of analysis, in preparation for its final or synthetic phase when the inner chid is activated.

An example of a patient who believed he had been cheated out of his childhood is offered by Bernard. At the age of twenty-four, he still felt unable to please his parents. Bernard was suffering from a negative father complex. That is, “he was excessively controlled by fatherly qualities which he experienced as negative and life-denying.” Moreover, he was emotionally paralyzed with little access to his feminine capacity for feeling. Although Bernard’s recollections of childhood were only fragmentary, and dream evidence of it indirect, a defense mechanism frequently noted by Asper among her adult patients, it became evident that the maternal-feeling element had been largely absent. His upbringing had been dominated by the objective values of his mother and the requirements of both parents that their children conform to middle-class standards.

Mixed with his feelings of helplessness and inadequacy, his asthma attacks and sense that he was being misjudged, Bernard began to experience the rage of a delayed adolescent rebellion. Without being aware of it, he projected the restrictive parental figures of his childhood onto any form of authority. That he had incorporated the strictness bordering on sadism of his father became apparent in the first dream he brought to analysis.

A later dream expressed the emotional abandonment he had experienced with parents who, rather than expressing concern over some childhood hurt, shifted the communication to an objective level, thereby failing to validate his feelings. Asper suggests a commonplace equivalent in the person who responds to the suffering of another “by mouthing some platitude such as ‘Every cloud must have a silver lining.’”

The theme of abandonment recurs with Monica, a young woman with a history of childhood incapacity which involved a series of hospital stays and years of immobility. A gifted child, with “extraordinary musical talent,” it was not until her eighth year that Monica began to lead a normal life.

Later, she was to train as a physiotherapist, and after pursuing this career, she decided to enter analysis, with the intention of broadening her qualifications as a therapist, and gaining a better understanding of herself, in particular, her tendency to form symbiotic relationships.

On the basis of her history, Kathrin Asper assumed the existence of an abandonment complex. A number of months before this complex emerged in the transference, Monica had a dream. The dream reflected a childhood experience of abandonment, her actual feeling as a two-year-old that in not being heard (or mirrored) she would not exist. It also expressed her sense, now as an adult, that these feelings, this fear of falling into a void, or disintegration anxiety, were too dangerous to explore.

The dream evoked in Monica’s analysis what she describes as an ”Aha! experience.” All of the information which had been gathered to this point, including Monica’s tendency to form symbiotic relationships, fell into a pattern of meaning. “The criterion for a complex-diagnostic dream, “ writes Asper, ‘”is the analyst’s being emotionally affected.” “But the experience of emotional understanding is not limited to the analyst;” she continues, “as a rule, the analysand is also deeply affected.”

Kathrin Asper goes on to say that “ (t)he complex diagnosis in psychological work is dependent on the quite specific constellation between a particular analysand and a particular analyst,” and that “this diagnosis changes in the course of analysis.” Moreover, work with another analyst by a given analysand might constellate, appropriately, quite another central complex.

The Inner Child in Dreams brings to mind the work of another Jungian analyst, San Francisco’s Barbara Stevens Sullivan, the author of Psychotherapy Grounded in the Feminine Principle (Chiron Publications, Wilmette, Ill., 1989). The language may be different but both share a belief in the importance of the feminine principle (Asper’s matriarchal principle) in healing the damaged inner children of their adult patients; both have been influenced by the work of D. W. Winnicott whose insights into “good-enough mothering,” for example, have affected not only their understanding, but their interaction with these patients.

Yet there are differences. To Sullivan, the battle between masculine-based therapy and feminine has been joined, while to Asper, it appears over. Both parents have found their time and space appropriate places in her work. Which means, in part, that she is not troubled as Sullivan appears to be, by the use of tranquilizers, should the situation demand it, by her patients in analysis. It seems fitting then that her child, the fruits of her creative labour, should represent the two parents or principles in a creative interplay.

On the subject of creativity Kathrin Asper stresses the importance of women developing “an animus, a masculine side in themselves, that affirms and values the specifically feminine capacities. Only then can they get fully involved in their creative potential and give it the space it needs to develop.” These “specifically feminine capacities” require an attitude of “expectant receptivity” to “the processes of growth, development, birth, and new life. To be genuinely creative we must first involve ourselves in these processes, opening up to creative inspiration without having a specific goal in mind.”

It is on this note that Kathrin Asper ends her book: “Finding the child in ourselves means making contact with the child we once were, achieving closeness to our innate nature, and ultimately becoming aware of our creative potentialities, the development of which always plays an essential role in shaping our future.”

— Alice Johnston