ABSTRACT
C.G. Jung had a strong interest in myths, symbols, ethnology and the various world religions since the early twentieth century. In 1910 he read books about excavations in Babylon and a compilation of several volumes entitled Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (Symbolism and mythology of ancient people) (Creuzer, 1819-1823). From these readings, the idea for the book on the fantasies of Miss Miller, with the title ‘Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido’ (Psychology of the Unconscious), resulted (Jung, 1925, p. 50; today volume 5 of the Collected Works is entitled Symbols of Transformation). This is the book that ultimately estranged him from Sigmund Freud and his ideas. Instead of proceeding as a reductionist like Freud, Jung looks at archetypal images and symbols as a creative power and wants to include them in all their width and diverse cultural expressions. Jung sees the symbol as a psychological processing facility that helps to calm the people and to find their centre. Symbols cannot be consciously created; they arise subconsciously because of archetypes, personal experiences, emotions, sensations and within a collective, cultural context. ‘The symbols were never devised consciously, but were always produced out of the unconscious by way of revelation or intuition’, says Jung (Jung, 1928, §92). With symbols the individual meets with the collective. Jung wants to decipher the complexity and diversity of the symbol with the question: what is the purpose of the symbol? Therefore, the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung is finally aligned. Jung has a diametrically opposed position to Freud, who is less interested in the symbol per se, but – in a causal way of looking – for what the symbol is hiding. The psyche can be represented symbolically in the approach of analytical psychology in processes such as dreams, fantasies, images, stories and
activities, as Verena Kast pointed out in her overview in The Dynamics of the Symbols (Kast, 1992). The term ‘symbol’ is not distinguished from the ‘archetypal image’, both of which are translated as allegory. The symbol is an idea, an image that makes sense, loaded with meaning. The symbol thus puts something together (Greek: symballo = together); it consists of a material part and a spiritual, non-material part. It contains a surplus of meaning and seems to be, on the one hand, conscious and rational, and on the other hand, unconscious. There is an objectively observable, visible meaning and an invisible, more hidden, irrational significance. This irrational meaning cannot be defined; it is understandable only to those who experience the symbol. Jung defines the concept of symbol in a quote often used as follows. He says the term symbol is ‘the best possible description or formulation of a relatively unknown fact, which is . . . known to exist or is postulated as existing’ (Jung, 1916, §148). While for some persons an image represents a deeper meaning (of a symbol), it has no meaning for someone else. For example, a national flag can represent a powerful symbol to a patriot, but for someone who is at home everywhere in the world and to whom the nation has no meaning, it symbolizes nothing. The national flag itself is only one substantive piece of cloth for him and leaves him cold; for the patriots, however, it is a symbol with an emotional and physical effect. For Jung, symbols originally had a meaning of expression character and impression character at the same time:
on one hand, they express the intrapsychic process in images; but, on the other hand, when they have become image, ‘incarnated’ as it were in a pictorial material, they ‘make an impression’, that is, their meaning content influences the intrapsychic process and furthers the flow of psychic energy,
as Jolande Jacobi explains, in summing up Jung’s life’s work (Jacobi, 1973, p. 94). Jacobi mentions the example of a client’s withered tree of life that shows pictorially that the latter had lost connection with his naturalistic instincts. Through the awareness of the image, a direction has been shown to him in which he could develop. In fact, in clinical practice this is experienced repeatedly; symbolic images can indicate where the problem is and where the development could proceed. Therefore, Jacobi writes that symbol transformers are mental events (Jacobi, 1973).
