Steiner's name for the self-righting force beneath waking consciousness: the wiser subconscious corrects false teaching through dreams and carries its work through death into future incarnations.
The Corrector in the Subconscious in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a self-righting force that works beneath the threshold of waking consciousness, undoing errors the surface mind has absorbed. Steiner named it (German: Korrigierer, also Lebenskorrigierer, a life-corrector) in Dornach on 13 November 1916, in the lecture cycle published as The Karma of Vocation (GA 172). His example comes from Friedrich Theodor Vischer's novel Auch Einer: a teacher insists that a man is known by his proper occupation, and that night the boy dreams of asking a lake what its job is. The lake answers that its job is to be wet. The dream is a reminiscence, yet also a corrector: the subconscious, wiser than surface consciousness, ridicules the false lesson and roots it out. The corrector works within one incarnation, is carried through the gate of death, and continues shaping karma; its closest modern relative is C. G. Jung's compensatory theory of dreams.
In November 1916, midway through a critique of psychoanalysis, Steiner named something the psychoanalysts had missed. The Corrector in the Subconscious is the healing counter-force in the soul's depths: where wrong teaching plants folly, the subconscious answers with a dream that mocks the folly and drives it out. The correction does not stop at death; it works on into the shaping of the next earthly life.
In Steiner's Own Words
In this case the dream is indeed a reminiscence; it follows in the very next night. But at the same time it is a corrector of life. Indeed the life of the astral body frequently works in this way. Beside the relics of what is there in the soul from the experiences of life, we should frequently find this factor. Especially where a mistaken education is at work, we can frequently detect in the sub-conscious forces of the soul this ‘corrector,’ who often works even in the same incarnation, especially in young human beings. But above all, this corrector is carried through the gate of death and there works on. There is really a kind of self-corrector in the human being. This must be borne in mind.
What it Means Today
In the same year Steiner gave this lecture, Carl Gustav Jung, working in Zurich after his break with Freud, wrote the essay published in his Collected Works (volume 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche) as General Aspects of Dream Psychology. Written in 1916 and revised in 1948, it rejects Freud's reading of the dream as a disguised wish and proposes instead that dreams compensate: the psyche is a self-regulating system, and when the conscious attitude grows one-sided, the dream supplies the counterweight. Jung held to this for the rest of his career, restating it in On the Nature of Dreams (1945) as the most dependable rule a dream interpreter has. The boy's lake dream in Steiner's example is a textbook Jungian compensation: the teacher's rigid doctrine of proper occupation is answered overnight by an image of majestic uselessness, a lake whose whole job is to be wet.
The parallel is close, and the difference is the whole point. Jung's compensation is biographical: it balances one personality within one lifetime. Steiner's Corrector has a longer employment contract. It works in the young person now, but it is carried through the gate of death and goes on correcting, turning a falsified life toward its right form in the next incarnation. Thalira synthesis: Jung documented the corrector's day shift; Steiner reported that the same worker never retires, carrying its corrections across the threshold of death into the karma of the life to come.
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