Symptom

In the depth tradition, the symptom is not a defect of the organism to be expunged but an event of the soul to be heard. Jung’s first move, against the neurology of his teachers, is the refusal to treat the symptom as merely pathological: “Psychoanalysis does not conceive the neurosis as anti-natural and in itself pathological, but as having a meaning and a purpose” (Jung, CW 4 §417). Like fever in modern medicine, the symptom is “a purposive reaction of the organism,” compromise between pathogenic cause and normal function — readable both etiologically and teleologically.

Jung’s specific contribution is the prospective dimension. The symptom is not only sign of a buried past; it is forward-pointing, an “orienteering function” of the psyche under regression (CW 8 §495). It announces an autonomous-psychic-complex that has slipped the ego’s containment because the conscious standpoint will not see “the other side of our nature and the urgency of its problems” (CW 7 §436). The symptom is the shadow‘s involuntary speech.

Edinger draws the alchemical consequence: every symptom derives from the image of some archetypal situation, and “to be able to recognize the archetype, to see the symbolic image behind the symptom, immediately transforms the experience. It may be just as painful, but now it has meaning” (Edinger 1972, p. 116). The symptom becomes the matter of the opus, not its impediment. Hillman presses further: even this translation can become an evasion. Pathologizing is the soul’s autonomous mode; the symptom is image. To cure the symptom is to lose the god (Hillman, Peaks and Vales).

Relationships

• compensation
• autonomous-psychic-complex
• passio-as-pathologizing
• transcendent-function
• transformative-image
• healing-symbol
• shadow
• pathos

Primary sources

• jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung 1953)
• edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972)
• hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman 1975)