Structural Dream Analysis, Explained: Roesler’s Method Step by Step (and Where to Read It Free)

Structural Dream Analysis is the only Jungian dream method that has been written down as a manual, handed to raters who know nothing about the dreamer, and checked against what the therapist saw in the room. It was developed by Christian Roesler, professor of psychology at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences in Freiburg, and first published in 2018 (Roesler, 2018a). Since then it has been run on 15 fully documented therapies, then on 150 case reports from the C. G. Jung Institute in Stuttgart, then on the most studied psychoanalytic case in history (Roesler, 2018b; Roesler & Widmer, 2023; Roesler, 2025).

If you searched for it, you probably hit a paywall. Wiley wants money for the 2020 paper and the Oxford chapter is locked. Every paper that matters is also available free, and the links are at the bottom of this post.

The method rests on one idea. A dream is a short story, and the story has a protagonist. Roesler calls that protagonist the dream ego. What the dream ego can and cannot do in the story, whether it flees, freezes, fights, arrives, or connects, carries more information about the dreamer than any single image in the dream (Roesler, 2020a). Dream dictionaries look up the snake. SDA asks what you did when the snake appeared, and what you did the next time, and the time after that.

Where the Method Comes From

Roesler built SDA out of two older tools. The first is Vladimir Propp’s functional analysis of Russian fairy tales, which reduces any story to a sequence of abstract functions so that different stories can be compared (Roesler, 2018a). The second is Brigitte Boothe’s JAKOB method, developed at the University of Zurich for analysing the stories patients tell in psychoanalysis, which tracks how much initiative the narrator gives himself in his own story (Roesler, 2018a).

Jung supplied the third piece: interpretation on the subjective level. Every figure in the dream is treated as a part of the dreamer’s own psyche (Jung, CW 8). Roesler’s method takes that seriously enough to measure it. He states the assumption plainly: the meaning of a dream “is not so much transmitted by the elements or symbols in the dream but by their interrelationships, or ‘structure’” (Roesler, 2025).

The research setup matters. After a therapy ends, the therapist selects 10 to 20 dreams that span the whole treatment and hands them to interpreters who are blind to everything else about the case: no diagnosis, no biography, no notes (Roesler, 2018a). The interpreters analyse the dreams alone. Only afterward are their findings laid against the therapist’s report. If the dreams told the truth about the patient, the two accounts should match.

The Seven Steps of the Original Method

The 2018 paper in the International Journal of Dream Research lays out the full procedure. It is numbered 1 through 8 with no step 7, so there are seven steps in practice (Roesler, 2018a).

Step 1, segmentation. Each dream is cut into its smallest units that still carry meaning, and each unit is placed in the narrative structure.

Step 2, episodic models. The arc of each dream is matched to one of Boothe’s ten patterns: continuity, climax, anticlimax, restitutio ad integrum after deintegration, restitutio ad integrum after climax, approbation, frustration, chance, anti-chance, and unexplainable changes.

Step 3, the fate of the protagonist. The dream ego’s position is coded in one of five ways: it holds the initiative throughout, others hold it throughout, it loses the initiative, it regains the initiative, or it is embedded in the initiative of others.

Step 4, functional analysis. Following Propp, each dream is reduced to its abstract functions so that dreams across the series can be laid side by side.

Step 5, interpretation of the major symbols. This is an amplification step, and it is the one most summaries leave out. Roesler kept Jung’s amplification but put it under constraint. The interpreters may use only a fixed set of symbol dictionaries covering a symbol’s meaning in mythology and religious tradition, they may apply it only to “a very restricted number of symbols, ideally those which appear repeatedly in the dreams,” and they may not bring psychoanalytic concepts into it (Roesler, 2018a). The point was to keep the cultural background of a symbol without letting the interpreter’s theory decide what it meant.

Step 6, integration. The symbol meanings are folded back into the structure found in steps 1 through 4. Roesler calls this “clearly the more psychological step” and limits it to translating the structure into psychological language, without fixing a final reading (Roesler, 2018a).

Step 8, as printed, the summary. Everything is combined into a description of the dream series as a whole.

That is the extensive form. It was applied to the first 15 cases, 202 dreams in the 2018 report and 206 by Roesler’s 2025 count (Roesler, 2018b; Roesler, 2025). Once those cases had been worked through, the patterns they shared became the instrument for everything after.

The Six Dream Patterns

The cross-case analysis found that a small set of story shapes covered almost every dream. Five patterns accounted for the majority in the first 15 cases; a sixth was added later, and the typology now sorts more than 90 percent of the dreams the team sees (Roesler, 2018b; Roesler, 2025, footnote 2). Each pattern has sub-levels, and the sub-levels run from the dream ego failing to the dream ego succeeding (Roesler, 2025, Table 1).

Pattern 1, no dream ego. The dreamer watches a scene like a film and takes no part. Roesler found it in only one case in the first sample, an 18-year-old with severe school refusal and, in the therapist’s assessment, almost no stable identity (Roesler, 2020a).

Pattern 2, the dream ego is threatened. Attacked, chased, injured. Sub-levels run from 2.1, the dream ego destroyed, through 2.3, it flees, to 2.5, it defends itself and the threat transforms. This was 42 percent of all dreams in the first sample and it clustered in patients diagnosed with narcissistic disorders and weak ego structure (Roesler, 2018b; Roesler, 2020a).

Pattern 3, a performance demand. An exam, an inspection, a task set by someone else. From 3.1, the dream ego fails, to 3.3, it copes through its own effort.

Pattern 4, mobility. The dream ego is trying to get somewhere. Locked in, no ticket, wrong train, road blocked, or, at 4.5, it arrives. Patterns 3 and 4 appeared in patients with a more stable ego who were stuck on decisions and next steps in life (Roesler, 2020a).

Pattern 5, social interaction. The dream ego tries to make contact, is ignored, meets obstacles, or succeeds. Roesler found it in patients with a stable ego and neurotic trouble around relationships (Roesler, 2020a).

Pattern 6, autonomy. The dream ego establishes or defends its separateness, is on its own and content, or has enough left over to help others (Roesler, 2025, Table 1).

The ordering is the theory. Read down the list and the dream ego gains agency at every step. Roesler’s claim is that dream-ego agency “can be equated with ego strength in the psychodynamic sense” (Roesler, 2025, p. 764). That is a testable claim, and it has been tested.

What the Research Found

You may have been told that dreams during therapy are noise, or that whatever pattern a therapist sees in them is the therapist’s projection. The blind raters saw the patterns without knowing there was a therapist.

In the first 15 cases, each patient’s series was dominated by one or two repeating patterns, and those patterns matched the psychological problems the therapist had independently described (Roesler, 2018b). In therapies the therapist rated as successful, the series moved: the first half was dominated by a weak dream ego, usually pattern 2, then “in the middle of the dream series there appears a dream or dream symbol which marks a change in the pattern,” and the second half shifted toward patterns 4 and 5 (Roesler, 2020a). In about half of the cases that showed this transformation, the marker was a baby or small child that needed care, which the dream ego at first struggled to give (Roesler, 2020a). Jung had described the child motif as a symbol of transformation decades earlier (Jung, CW 9i).

Then the team tested it on a case nobody in Jungian circles chose. Amalia X is the specimen case of German psychoanalysis, a Freudian treatment of more than 500 sessions, recorded, transcribed, and studied more than any other therapy on record. It contained 96 dreams (Roesler, 2020b; Roesler & Widmer, 2023). The prediction was a movement from patterns 1 and 2 toward 4 and 5. Roesler writes: “This hypothesis could be empirically confirmed” (Roesler, 2020a).

Then the scale went up. Using the six-pattern typology as a coding scheme, with at least two trained raters per series, the team coded 150 case reports from the Stuttgart Jung Institute, written by training candidates between 1991 and 2018. Successful cases showed “a clear upward movement of the dreams through the dream patterns, with a parallel significant rise in dream ego agency” (Roesler, 2025). A therapy the therapist recorded as failed showed the curve going down, with the collapse of the alliance around session 25 visible as a regression in the dreams. And a control series of 208 dreams from a person who never had therapy showed no upward movement at all (Roesler, 2025).

Inter-rater agreement across the reliability studies runs from a Cohen’s kappa of .42 to .82, which is moderate to strong for a qualitative coding scheme (Jenni & Roesler, 2024; Roesler, 2020a).

The sentence you can repeat: blind raters, reading nothing but the dreams, can tell a therapy that worked from one that did not, and they can see the moment it turned.

What It Did Not Find

Two Freudian claims failed outright. Roesler found “no evidence of a process of censorship in the sense of Freud”: the dreams showed the patient’s situation openly, often dramatically, with no distortion to decode (Roesler, 2020a). Wish fulfilment failed too. The early dreams of most patients “were putting the strongest fears of the dreamer into clear images” (Roesler, 2020a).

One Jungian claim came out contested. Roesler reads his data as showing the dream presenting “a more holistic picture of the total situation of the psyche,” and he doubts that this amounts to compensation as Jung described it; in his 2025 paper he suggests the dream’s function may be “not so much compensating, but more confronting consciousness with the actual reality of the psychological situation” (Roesler, 2020a; Roesler, 2025). Whether that is a disagreement with Jung or a restatement of him depends on how narrowly you read the word. Jung defined compensation as the psyche’s self-regulation, the dream supplying what the conscious attitude lacks (Jung, CW 8). A dream that confronts a patient with a fear the waking mind has been refusing to look at is doing exactly that. The data settle less here than the language suggests, and Roesler himself defers the full argument to a forthcoming publication.

One more finding cuts against every dream dictionary ever sold. Across dreamers, “we found no support for the assumption that there are typical meanings connected with specific symbols” (Roesler, 2025). In one woman’s series the snake was a repeated threat; in one young man’s it was a repeated helper. The symbol meant something stable within each person’s series and nothing stable between them.

Motif Analysis and Phase Model: The 2024 Extension

The constrained amplification of step 5 had a ceiling. It could say what water or a house has meant in the world’s mythologies. It could not say what water was doing across 200 of one person’s dreams. In August 2024 Patrick Jenni and Roesler published Motif Analysis and Phase Model, MAP, as an extension of SDA built for exactly that (Jenni & Roesler, 2024).

MAP starts by counting nouns. A motif is defined as a concrete noun in the dream text, with names converted to their role (a specific man becomes “father,” a specific city becomes “city”). Motifs are ranked by frequency, thinned by rule, and then, for every dream a motif appears in, the researcher records the dream ego’s affect, the mood, and the recurring themes around it. The last step divides each motif’s history into phases (Jenni & Roesler, 2024, §2.2).

They ran it on 217 dreams from one man’s training analysis between 1969 and 1976, under two Jungian analysts. Eight motifs survived the thinning: mother, locomotion, water, house, father, child, girl, and master. Five of them changed structure over the series, and all five changed in the same four phases (Jenni & Roesler, 2024, §3.1). In the prodromal phase the motif appears but the dream ego meets it the same defensive way every time. In the aggregation phase the motif gains texture and the dream ego sees new sides of it. In the confrontation phase the dream ego pursues its own wishes against the motif, sometimes violently. In the integration phase the motif is harmonised and slides out of the centre of the dream. The phase changes lined up with two turning points the dreamer named in interview, one of them the switch to his second analyst, and the child motif appeared at both (Jenni & Roesler, 2024, §3.1).

The limits are stated in the paper. It is one case. Steps 3 and 4 leave room for the researcher’s judgement, and no reliability test has yet been run on MAP (Jenni & Roesler, 2024, §4.5). The SDA pattern scores for this dreamer did not shift significantly, which the authors attribute to a man who entered analysis for training, with no symptoms to lose (Jenni & Roesler, 2024, §4.4). Roesler’s team uses SDA’s six patterns for the cross-case work and MAP for going deeper into what a single motif is doing. Both are current.

A Worked Example

Take a short series of five dreams from a reader we will call M., recorded over four months.

Dream 1. M. is in her childhood house. Water is coming under the door. She cannot find the key to get out. She wakes.

Dream 2. A flood outside. She stands at the window. Her brother is outside in the water and she cannot open the window.

Dream 3. The house again. Water is ankle deep. She wades to the door, and it opens, but the street is also flooded and she stops on the step.

Dream 4. She is on a boat with a stranger who hands her the oars. She rows badly, then better, and reaches the far bank.

Dream 5. She is swimming in a lake at night. It is cold and she is not afraid. Her brother is on the shore and waves.

An SDA coding reads this as 2.2, 2.2, 4.3, 4.5, then 5.3: a dream ego that is overwhelmed, then overwhelmed again, then moving with obstacles, then arriving, then in successful contact. That is the upward movement Roesler’s successful therapies show, compressed into five nights.

A MAP reading follows the water. Prodromal in dreams 1 and 2: water is a threat and M. meets it the same way, by trying to get out. Aggregation in dream 3: the door opens, and water is now also a street, a place. Confrontation in dream 4: she takes the oars. Integration in dream 5: she is in the water and it is no longer the subject of the dream; her brother is.

Neither reading tells you what water means. Both tell you what M. did with it and when that changed. If you know what was happening in M.’s waking life in the week between dreams 3 and 4, you know what the turning point was. That is where an interpretation starts, and it is the interview step Jenni and Roesler put at the end of their method for exactly this reason.

Where to Read the Papers Free

Roesler’s 2018 method paper is open access in the International Journal of Dream Research, and the International Association for Analytical Psychology hosts the PDF (Roesler, 2018a). The Dreaming paper with the 15-case results is paywalled by the APA, but the IAAP hosts that PDF too (Roesler, 2018b). The 2020 Journal of Analytical Psychology paper is paywalled by Wiley; the Society of Analytical Psychology hosts a free copy, and Roesler published a near-identical version, with the Amalia X analysis, open access in the International Journal of Dream Research the same year (Roesler, 2020a; Roesler, 2020b). The Amalia reanalysis and the MAP paper are both open access at MDPI (Roesler & Widmer, 2023; Jenni & Roesler, 2024). The 2025 paper is free on PubMed Central (Roesler, 2025). The only locked text is the Oxford book chapter, and its abstract is word for word the 2018 paper’s.

Start with the 2018 method paper. It is nine pages and it contains the manual. Then read the 2025 paper for the table of six patterns. Then take your own dream journal, code the last ten dreams by pattern, and look at the direction of the line.

Sources

Jenni, P., & Roesler, C. (2024). A new way of analysing dreams on its profoundest level: The development of Motif Analysis and Phase Model (MAP) as an extension of Structural Dream Analysis (SDA). Behavioral Sciences, 14(8), 658. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14080658 (open access)

Jung, C. G. (1969). General aspects of dream psychology. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works Vol. 8). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1969). The psychology of the child archetype. In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works Vol. 9i). Princeton University Press.

Roesler, C. (2018a). Structural Dream Analysis: A narrative research method for investigating the meaning of dream series in analytical psychotherapies. International Journal of Dream Research, 11(1), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.11588/ijodr.2018.1.41330 (open access; free PDF: https://iaap.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ART-IJDR-Roesler.pdf)

Roesler, C. (2018b). Dream content corresponds with dreamer’s psychological problems and personality structure and with improvement in psychotherapy: A typology of dream patterns in dream series of patients in analytical psychotherapy. Dreaming, 28(4), 303–321. https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000092 (free PDF: https://iaap.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Roesler-SDA-Dreaming.pdf)

Roesler, C. (2020a). Jungian theory of dreaming and contemporary dream research: Findings from the research project ‘Structural Dream Analysis’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 65(1), 44–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12566 (free PDF: https://www.jungiananalysts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Roesler-JAP-65-2020-Jungian-Theory-of-Dreaming-1.pdf)

Roesler, C. (2020b). The structural approach to the empirical investigation of the meaning of dreams: Findings from the research project “Structural Dream Analysis”. International Journal of Dream Research, 13(1), 46–55. https://doi.org/10.11588/ijodr.2020.1.67600 (open access)

Roesler, C. (2021). Structural dream analysis: A narrative methodology for investigating the meaning of dream series and their development in the course of psychotherapy. In G. Lucius-Hoene, C. Holmberg, & T. Meyer (Eds.), Illness Narratives in Practice: Potentials and Challenges of Using Narratives in Health-related Contexts. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780198806660.003.0018

Roesler, C. (2025). Jung’s theory of dreaming and the findings of empirical and clinical dream research. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 70(5), 764–786. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.70011 (free at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12517111/)

Roesler, C., & Widmer, D. (2023). Amalia revisited: A reanalysis of Amalia’s dreams with the method Structural Dream Analysis. Brain Sciences, 13(5), 796. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13050796 (open access)