Inner Work: A Four-Step Journey to Self-Transformation, Unearthing Subconscious Strengths, and Interpreting Dreams with Jungian Psychology

I found the book very helpful in explaining inner work in a way that made it easy to start practicing myself. It is also decently concise and focused. An easy recomendation for anyone looking to start dream work and or active imagination.

My favorite book on Dream working (and other types of inner work) - helps you learn your own personal dream language and symbols so you are not dependent on some a dictionary that someone else wrote. Totally Awesome

This book has been helpful for me to customise my own process of active imagination and dream work. It's written in a straightforward manner, pointing to relevant areas of Carl Jung's work so one can read up more. I was inspired to get Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Jung to dive deeper. That's a well written and digestible book too as it's done in an autobiographical form.

In Inner Work, Johnson provides a thorough and easy to follow guide on how to engage with your unconscious. Though one can find a lot in Jung on symbolic interpretation, he was somewhat cagey about detailing exactly how to go about active imagination. He gives the right amount of context, in what is essentially a practical manual, without bogging the reader down in theory that can be consulted elsewhere if necessary. If there is one criticism I have of the book it is that he chose to highlight dream interpretation instead of active imagination. Jung maintained that active imagination, though decidedly more difficult, was far more powerful and rewarding than its passive cousin. Further, that dreams were regularly warning signals that something in the psyche was already out of balance. The need for the unconscious to communicate through dreams subsides when conscious fantasies are taken more seriously. Johnson could have made a more spirited case for shifting one's attention to preventative, active aspects of maintaining balance.

I've read a few books and listened to some CDs on dream interpretation, but Johnson's Inner Work is the first one to give me real confidence that I can do this myself. The process he outlines does take time -- it isn't a "go with your gut" quick fix -- but it leads to some intense, evocative results. The 4-step process is deceptively simple: Step 1 - Identify key images and your associations to those images; Step 2 - Ask yourself where these images/associations show up in your life; Step 3 - Interpret the dream, and; Step 4 - Complete a ritual around the dream that makes it more concrete in your life. I was amazed at the many associations that came to me with each image as I completed step 1, some of them were relevant and some not, but ALL of them made me think. Step 2, I admit is the most difficult for me, and step 4 probably the most meaningful. Again, this is not for the lazy or faint of heart. You don't just dive into interpretation, and it takes some effort to make the associations Johnson asks us to make in order to arrive at a reasonable interpretation. But it sure is worth it! I've made some interpretations that have just astonished me and moved me. Beyond the mechanics of dream interpretation, the book is incredibly well written. Johnson is a thoughtful, engaging writer who puts words together in a way that we not only understand but enjoy reading.

The quality of the book is very good with only a few minor tears in the jacket cover. No markings or discolorations on the inner pages. The content of the book is amazing as well - highly recommended as an actual working field guide for dreamwork and active imagination. Very clear explanations and case study examples.

I loved this book! It's very informative, but also easy to read. I'm not really into interpreting dreams (I think it's kind of boring, and I have too many of them), but Active Imagination is such a gem! I've read about similar techniques of talking to your inner child and what not, but they never really worked for me. This book finally brought it home. I think I'm gonna be using Active Imagination a lot in my life. I've already tried a few times and I am amazed at how real the feelings are. If you're a Jungian analyst, you probably already know this stuff, but I'm a layperson with interest in psychology, so for me this book was perfect.

I did learn some things from this book and it was an enjoyable read. However he expects you to do your own research instead of putting it in the book. Example. A guy recites his dream and Robert interprets the fact that the dream took place in front of his grandmother's house to represent the territory of the Great Mother archtype and uses that knowledge for interpretation. WHAT!! Using his method I would have thought, childhood, safety or innocence. Especially since he said in a previous chapter that you will recognize dreams with archtypes immediately because they feel ancient and otherworldly. This dream was about a guy lying in a ditch outside his grandmother's house talking to his sister. What was so ancient about that? I know nothing of the archtypes. He suggests you do research on the archtypes from history, myths, legends and fairy tales. Isn't that what this book is suppose to teach me??!! I understand the scope of the book cannot include 100's of pages of this but he could have spent a chapter giving the basic types and how they may show up in a dream. I was disappointed in this book.

Un livre de grande qualité , très pédagogique permettant de mieux se connaitre grâce à la grande expérience de Robert .A Jonhson dans le domaine de la connaissance de soi sous toutes nos facettes .

Gives lots of tools to work on yourself. His explanations cleared out a lot of my doubts about practicing active imagination.

Looking into "how to" do shadow work on oneself, i came across this book as a recommendation. This book turned out to be so much more than that. The techniques can be practically used by anyone trying to look within for answers. Be it to spiritual question or a practical day to day problem. I literally "devoured" a book after a long time. It was an eye opening experience. As an attempt to lucid dream, i started taking notes of my dreams since the last few days. The idea was to bring the dreams to a "conscious" level. The notes stayed there in the journal without me doing anything with them. While reading the book, i picked a particularly bizzare one and used the techniques to try to analyse it. Before i was finished however, i realised the not so bizzare ones had equally profound messages for me. I couldnt have imagined anything equally or more profound than my meditation practice in bringing me closer to conscoius awareness. This book changed that for me. Although my meditation practice has brought a sense of wholeness over the past few years, i realised it left some parts of my "being" undernourished. It gave me the insight into why after years of trying to calm my mind and having made significant progress, why sometimes parts of me come up which i can barely recognize about myself. I have not read any other book on dream analysis or active imagination before this one so I am not in a position to compare. However, after reading several books and spending plenty of time on self development, i feel this book will always be one of the few that hold a potential to bring an actual change in my life. I recommed it to anyone who seeks answers and realises that the only place where they can be sought is "inside" oneself.

This is the book I've been looking for all my life! I've always loved the idea of deciphering my dreams, but dream dictionaries and other dream manuals always fell short of the mark. Well, no longer! It takes some work, but if you're willing to put in the work, you'll suddenly realise that your dreams are a lot more relevant that you might give them credit for, and it's not the woo woo thing that everyone seems to agree on. Dreams offer us pure unconscious material filled with symbology, which this book helps us to not only decipher, but to integrate said material and resolve ongoing issues that may have plagued us for years. It feels like a light has been switched on, as I now have direct access to my own inner wisdom, in a way that is far more objective than I ever thought possible.

Excellent introductory book to (unsupervised) Jungian dream analysis and active imagination for beginners. The author gives an approachable overview of such necessary jungian terms as unconscious, archetypes, symbols, ego, consciousness and individuation and how their interplay in dream and active imagination images, when properly understood and directly related to our everyday life through ritual (the translating of spirit into matter or of intellectual understanding into physical reality), they contribute to a deepening and widening of our consciousness and goad us steadily on the journey to individuation. This does not claim to be the ultimate book on dream analysis because there simply cannot be such a book. When it comes to inner work one can only get so much from books the most valuable contribution being one's lifelong commitment to the painstaking journey itself. I heartily recommend this book