Symbol

Symbol in Jung‘s technical sense is not a conventional sign that stands for something known but the psychic form by which an otherwise inarticulable content of the unconscious becomes representable. The Jungian symbol is a living symbol: it arises spontaneously, it carries a charge of psychic energy, it unites opposites that could not be united by conceptual thought, and when it has done its work it subsides into the ordinary sign-status it will have for the next generation.

The decisive distinction is between symbol and sign. A sign points to something already known (the red light signifies “stop”); a symbol points beyond anything that can be fully known and is the best available representation of it. When the tradition says cross, or mandala, or philosopher’s stone, the term is functioning symbolically when it carries the psychic energy of the unresolved reality it represents, and functioning as sign only when it has been reduced to its conventional meaning. The symbol is the product of the transcendent-function: the psyche’s work of bringing two incompatible contents into a new third. See symbol-and-sign and transcendent-function.

Relationships

• symbol-and-sign
• transcendent-function
• jung-symbols-transformation