arrested symbols
The term 'fluid symbols' — and its counterpart, 'arrested symbols' — names a fundamental tension running through depth-psychological theory of meaning-making: whether symbolic content remains generative and open-ended, or collapses into fixed, sign-like equivalences. Jodorowsky articulates this most explicitly in the Tarot context, insisting that each symbol 'does not have one fixed meaning' and that the reading fails if it treats the arcana as frozen definitions rather than inexhaustibly charged presences. Jung's own corpus, particularly the alchemical and typological writings, underscores the distinction between symbols proper — which carry surplus meaning beyond any single referent — and mere signs, whose meaning is fully conventionalised. Andrew Samuels documents how successive generations of Jungian analysts have wrestled with the drift toward arrested symbolism: third-generation analysts, following Hillman, diagnose a corruption whereby symbols become 'stand-ins for concepts,' and advocate a return to the fluid image. Peterson, drawing on Jung's Psychological Types, frames symbols as 'shaped energies' whose affective power depends on remaining dynamically unresolved. The alchemical lexicon explored by Abraham illustrates how a single image — water, sea, mercurial fluid — ramifies into dozens of interdependent meanings, resisting reduction. Together these voices reveal that the vitality of symbolic life depends on resisting arrest: the moment a symbol is pinned to one referent, its psychic efficacy is extinguished.
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 explicitly argues against arrested symbolism, insisting the Tarot arcana must remain semantically inexhaustible rather than reducible to any single authoritative meaning.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004thesis
Symbols have become 'stand-ins for concepts'... The taste of the third generation, according to Hillman, is for the rescue of image from symbol.
Samuels diagnoses the historical arrest of depth-psychological symbols into conceptual counters, and charts Hillman's corrective movement back toward fluid, immanent images.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
Symbols are shaped energies, determining ideas whose affective power is just as great as their spiritual value.
Peterson, via Jung's Psychological Types, frames symbols as dynamic energic formations — their power residing in the tension between form and surplus meaning — rather than as fixed semantic units.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
danger of fixed meaning, 157; derivation from archaic functioning, 123... relatively fixed, 156, 158, 160... an unknown quantity, 156
Jung's own index entries in the Collected Works explicitly thematise the danger of fixing symbolic meaning and contrast it with the symbol's irreducible status as 'an unknown quantity.'
, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954supporting
the membrum is itself—as Kranefeldt points out—an emblem of something whose wider content is not at all easy to determine... the phallus always means the creative mana, the power of healing and fertility.
Jung demonstrates how a symbol conventionally reduced to a single referent in fact opens onto an inexhaustible chain of mythological analogies, illustrating the principle of fluid over arrested symbolism.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting
mythological figures... are not only symptoms of the unconscious... but also controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual principles, which have remained as constant throughout the course of human history as the form and nervous structure of the human physique itself.
Campbell positions mythological symbols as simultaneously constant in structure yet inexhaustibly particular in instantiation — a formulation that supports the fluid-symbol position against semantic arrest.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
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.
The I Ching's foundational concept of I is presented as the paradigm case of a fluid symbolic system, foregrounding openness and multivalence over fixed definition.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
Symbols... can lead to better, more humane and dignified relations with one another, or to the most horrifying exploitations. Jung spent a lifetime analyzing symbols. He believed that their ambiguity derives from a fundamental dynamic within the psyche.
Ulanov establishes that symbolic ambiguity — the refusal of arrest — is not a deficiency but a structural feature rooted in the psyche's own tensions of opposites.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting
The sea's expansive, amorphous state makes it an obvious choice of image for something that is formless but contains forms within it.
Abraham illustrates the alchemical sea as a paradigmatic fluid symbol — a prima materia that resists fixation precisely because it contains all possible forms without being reducible to any one.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
the children are the mother's symbols. This is the mother's psychology. The children are symbols of the undeveloped things in her.
Jung's seminar remark illustrates how a symbol's meaning shifts according to whose psychology it inhabits, implicitly affirming the context-dependency that characterises fluid over arrested symbolism.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984aside