Glossary: Compensation

An automatic process by the unconscious to correct for excessive one-sidedness in the conscious personality. Counterbalance; the appearance of an opposite attitude when behavior is too one-sided. Along with dreams and neuroses, compensation is one of the mechanisms the unconscious uses to maintain balance in the psyche in its drive for wholeness.

The activity of consciousness is selective. Selection demands direction. But direction requires the exclusion of everything irrelevant. This is bound to make the conscious orientation one-sided. The contents that are excluded and inhibited by the chosen direction sink into the unconscious, where they form a counterweight to the conscious orientation. The strengthening of this counterposition keeps pace with the increase of conscious one-sidedness until finally… the repressed unconscious contents break through in the form of dreams and spontaneous images… As a rule, the unconscious compensation does not run counter to consciousness, but is rather a balancing or supplementing of the conscious orientation. In dreams, for instance, the unconscious supplies all those contents that are constellated by the conscious situation but are inhibited by conscious selection, although a knowledge of them would be indispensable for complete adaptation

- "Definitions," CW 6, par. 694

We have observed that this equilibrium is a function of the self. The Self, the innermost regulating center of the psyche, seems to aim at keeping the whole psychological system in a fluid balance. We call that the law of compensation. Whenever one takes on a lop-sided attitude in consciousness – too rational, too spiritual, too materialistic, too driven by a single drive – then the dreams compensate by bringing up that which outweigh it on the other side, that’s why Saint Augustine after his conversion to a higher spirituality said, “Thank God, I am not responsible for my dreams.” He must have had dreams which pulled him right down to earth.

This law of compensation, however, is not a mechanical compensation: if I try to be good, my dreams will be bad, or, if I try to be too cheerful, my dreams will be melancholy. It’s not a mechanical way of bringing in the opposite. Rather, it is a compensation in the service of the totality. It is as if the dream says, “You are lop-sided compared to your inner totality.” That is the essential wisdom of the dream: to preserve a balance among all our psychic opposites and establish a kind of middle ay. The unconscious seems to be in favor of the Chinese Yin/Yang philosophy, or the idea of the Tao as being a subtle balance of opposites.

- Marie Louise von Franz (from Fraser Boa’s The Way of the Dream), p. 226