In Jungian psychoanalysis, spiralling names both a mode of argument and a mode of learning. It is not a technique in the procedural sense, nor a method aimed at arriving quickly at conclusions. Rather, it is a disciplined way of returning—again and again—to the same psychic material from incrementally altered perspectives, allowing meaning to constellate rather than be extracted.
The idea is articulated with particular clarity in John Foreman’s introduction to Man and His Symbols, where he describes Jung’s characteristic style of thought as a circling movement rather than a linear proof. Jung’s arguments, Foreman suggests, move “like a bird circling a tree,” each pass revealing familiar features in new relations until a sense of wholeness emerges . This metaphor is not decorative; it describes the epistemology at work.
In dream interpretation, spiralling resists the temptation to decode symbols once and for all. A dream image is not treated as a cipher to be solved, but as a living phenomenon whose significance unfolds over time. The dreamer revisits the dream repeatedly—through feeling, association, personal history, and present-life context—each time asking a slightly different question, noticing a different affect, or occupying a different internal position. Meaning arises cumulatively, not deductively.
In my own practice, spiralling functions as an iterative dialogue between conscious reflection and unconscious response. Each return to the dream is informed by what has already been noticed, but not constrained by it. Contradictions are not resolved prematurely; they are held. Interpretations are provisional, allowed to age, and sometimes quietly abandoned. This mirrors Jung’s conviction that the unconscious is not an object of mastery but a partner in communication, one that “argues back” through images, moods, and subsequent dreams.
From a learning-theory perspective, spiralling offers a model that stands in contrast to outcome-driven or assessment-led approaches. It privileges depth over speed, synthesis over coverage, and transformation over acquisition. Learners do not move forward by leaving material behind, but by re-encountering it at a higher level of integration. What changes is not the content, but the learner’s relation to it.
Crucially, spiralling also acknowledges that some forms of knowing are not accessible through linear exposition. Jung’s method, as Foreman notes, persuades “not by means of the narrowly focused spotlight of the syllogism,” but through repetition, variation, and symbolic resonance . This has implications well beyond dreamwork. In reflective practice, professional learning, and creative inquiry, spiralling legitimises forms of understanding that emerge gradually and cannot be timestamped to a single moment of insight.
Spiralling, then, is best understood as a respectful patience with complexity. It is a commitment to stay with material long enough for it to reveal its own order. In Jungian dream interpretation, this patience is not ancillary to insight; it is the condition under which insight becomes possible.