Healing Symbol

The healing symbol is Woodman’s gloss, in Jung’s vocabulary, on the metaphor that operates simultaneously on three registers: “the mental level on which we interpret meaning, the imaginative level, where the actual transforming power resides, and the emotional level connected to the feelings embodied in the metaphor” (Woodman 1993, p. 55). When a metaphor “really hits you,” she writes, “it gives you goose pimples; you say, ‘Ah, that’s it, that’s it, yes.’ The whole being is momentarily brought into a sense of wholeness” (ibid.).

The concept names Woodman’s most precise methodological contribution. The metaphor, to heal, must be taken into the body on the breath: “Then it can connect with the life force, and things can change — physically and psychologically” (Woodman 1993, p. 17). The dream-image, fed back to the body via the imagination, becomes the channel by which the somatic-unconscious is reached. The literal reading of dream content is, by contrast, a leak: “if you start acting out everything that comes into your dreams, you just leak the energy and no transformation will take place within the soul” (Woodman 1993, p. 56). The same energy taken back into the body as image registers in the cell.

The concept sits inside Jung’s larger account of the symbol as bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, but Woodman’s contribution is to specify the body as the third term — the register without which the symbol’s transformative power is theoretical. It is the methodological correlate of embodied-consciousness.

Relationships

Primary sources

woodman-conscious-femininity-interviews (Woodman 1993, pp. 17, 55–56)