Aggressiveness Dream Meanings

(1) If you behave aggressively in a dream, then either your unconscious is telling you that there is some aggression in you that you have not acknowledged fully or that you need or ought to be in some sense aggressive: more self-assertive, more in conscious control of your life and circumstances, less passive or subservient, less submissive or fatalistic. Do you tend to be unnecessarily or inappropriately aggressive towards people, for example, when the shop assistant ignores you or you find that you have been sold a faulty article? If so, perhaps there is a history of feeling rejected or undervalued. Are you - in your dream - aggressive towards your wife / husband / partner / parent / brother / sister? If so, the dream may be expressing unconscious resentment or jealousy towards that person. Unconscious hostile wishes towards someone closely related are very common.

(2) If you are the victim of the aggressiveness in the dream, the message may be that you are in a situation - at home or at work - that is threatening to destroy or diminish you. In that case, you must get yourself physically out of that situation.

Bear in mind, however, the possibility that everything in your dreams represents some part of you. Therefore, look for some part of you that is aggressively disposed towards the rest of you, or towards some other part of you. Perhaps, for instance, there is some guilt-feeling which causes (another part of) you to be angry, either against yourself or against other people. (Anger and guilt often go together, as the two sides of the same coin; anger frequently stems from guilt, and guilt from anger.)

(3) If the aggressor in the dream is not yourself, the meaning of the dream may be that there is some part of your psyche - some instinctive urge, perhaps - that has been neglected or repressed and is now getting rebellious. Sympathetic control of instincts is good; keeping them in chains is bad, and can only lead to trouble. Identify and get acquainted with the rebellious element in yourself, and engage in honest and receptive dialogue with it.

See also Fear.

Freud spoke of an ‘aggressive drive’ which showed itself everywhere, in sex as well as in war. For Jung’s contemporary, Alfred Adler, this aggressive power-drive was the most fundamental force in the psyche. Aggressiveness, however, may be sublimated; it may be tamed and directed into creative channels. I don’t know to what extent entrepreneurial enterprise would qualify as creative, but it is certainly an expression of aggressiveness a few degrees less savage than the crudest

AIRrORT

forms of physical aggression. Less ambiguous examples of sublimated aggressiveness arc problem-solving of all kinds, scientific research, artistic work and making love. (Making love is almost invariably to some extent forceful, even when it is also tender or indeed reverential. On the other hand, brutal love-making is a contradiction in terms, and usually results from emotional or sexual repression.)