ABSTRACT
Jung, more than any of psychology’s pioneers, had a feeling for the symbolic character of psychological life. He understood that life can be meaningfully and consciously lived only if our experience has metaphorical and sacred resonance. This was his self-proclaimed myth, the “myth of meaning.” But he struggled endlessly with the question of how to understand conceptually this “symbolic life”. The problem remained to the extent that he accepted the Galilean/Cartesian view of the world as a mathematical and physical reality, because he then found it necessary to draw on the notion of “projection” to account for experiential meaning. In this way Jung attempted to locate the symbolic life as an internal sensibility, separate from the world. But this too was an unsatisfactory solution for Jung, especially as his alchemical sensibility called for an appreciation of meaning that was ultimately not psychological, at least if that term is in any way linked to the parameters of human mentation.
