arrested symbols
The Seba library treats Fluid Symbols in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Jodorowsky, Alejandro, Peterson, Cody, Samuels, Andrew).
Each symbol does not have one fixed meaning. It is not a question of finding its ‘secret definition.’ It involves giving it the most sublime definition possible.
Jodorowsky argues explicitly against arrested symbols, insisting that Tarot Arcana must remain semantically open and be charged with maximal rather than singular meaning.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004thesis
Symbols are shaped energies, determining ideas whose affective power is just as great as their spiritual value.
Peterson, citing Jung’s Psychological Types, frames symbols as dynamic, energetically charged forms rather than static signs, positioning fluidity as intrinsic to symbolic function.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
Symbols have become ‘stand-ins for concepts.’ The once-forgotten language of the unconscious had been largely reclaimed by the founding fathers and by the second generation.
Samuels, summarizing Hillman, diagnoses the reduction of symbols to arrested conceptual stand-ins as a failure of depth-psychological practice, advocating a return to imagistic fluidity.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
Primitive people, who, like the ancients, make the freest use of phallic symbols, would never dream of confusing the phallus, as a ritualistic symbol, with the penis.
Jung demonstrates that genuine symbols resist reduction to a single referent, using the phallic symbol as evidence that symbolic meaning is always overdetermined and fluid across analogical networks.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954thesis
danger of fixed meaning, 157; derivation from archaic functioning, 123; … relatively fixed, 156, 158, 160; … an unknown quantity, 156.
This index entry from the Collected Works signals Jung’s explicit distinction between ‘relatively fixed’ and fully open symbols, marking fixity as a danger while preserving a spectrum between sign and living symbol.
, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954supporting
Symbols are ambiguous. They can lead to better, more humane and dignified relations with one another, or to the most horrifying exploitations.
Ulanov grounds symbolic fluidity in Jung’s concept of the tension of opposites, showing that ambiguity is constitutive of symbols and that arresting them in one value is itself a psychological and ethical risk.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting
The term I emphasizes imagination, openness and fluidity. It suggests the ability to change direction quickly and the use of a variety of imaginative stances to mirror the variety of being.
Ritsema and Karcher locate fluidity as a foundational property of the I Ching’s symbolic system, arguing that ‘versatility’ rather than fixed coding is the epistemological principle of oracular symbols.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
All the visible structures of the world—all things and beings—are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation.
Campbell’s account of universal symbolic power as a dynamic substrate underlying all particular forms implicitly supports the concept of fluid symbols as condensations of a single undifferentiated energy taking multiple legitimate forms.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
Children are symbols of a new thing coming … the children are the mother’s symbols … symbols of the undeveloped things in her.
Jung’s seminar notation illustrates how the same symbol—children—shifts meaning depending on whose psychology is operative, demonstrating the contextual fluidity of symbolic content in clinical practice.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984aside