Flying occupies a richly ambivalent position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as somatic metaphor, oneiric symbol, archetypal image, and cultural projection. Freud identifies flying dreams as a distinct ‘typical’ class whose raw material derives from a constant bodily source, yet insists their latent meaning varies with each dreamer — a caution against univocal interpretation. Greek tragic usage, recovered by Ruth Padel, discloses an older stratum in which ‘flying’ names the agitation of emotion and daemonic influence inside the phren itself: to fly is to be seized, displaced, made other. In the alchemical tradition surveyed by Lyndy Abraham, the flying eagle figures the volatile mercurial principle undergoing sublimation — ascent as transformation. Jung extends the aerial motif into collective psychology, reading the UFO phenomenon as a projection of the Self-symbol onto the sky at a moment of civilizational crisis; von Franz amplifies this, noting that flying saucers have become for many a ‘redemptive or destructive manifestation of the divine.’ Clinically, Shapiro demonstrates that a circumscribed fear of flying may mask unprocessed familial trauma — the phobic object concealing a deeper relational wound. Across these registers, flying condenses aspiration, escape, inflation, and visionary excess, making it one of the corpus’s most tensile and overdetermined motifs.
Emotion ‘flies’ in the mind. In the Bacchae, Pentheus, like his mother, falls under Dionysus’s maddening influence… ‘Now you are flying, and though you are sane you are not thinking sanely.’
Padel demonstrates that for the Greek tragedians, ‘flying’ is the defining metaphor for emotion and daemonic agitation moving inside the mind, equivalent to madness or seizure by a divine force.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
The second group of typical dreams included those where the dreamer flies or floats in the air, falls, swims, etc. What is the meaning of such dreams? It is impossible to give a general reply.
Freud classifies flying as a ‘typical’ dream category whose sensory source is constant but whose meaning resists universal interpretation, requiring individual analytic attention.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
Flying saucers have become for many people a symbol of the Self, a redemptive or destructive manifestation of the divine.
Von Franz, following Jung, reads collective fascination with unidentified flying objects as a projection of the Self-archetype onto the heavens, marking a civilizational longing for transcendence and wholeness.
, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975thesis
The ‘disks,’ however, that is, the objects themselves, do not behave in accordance with physical laws but as though they were weightless, and they show signs of intelligent guidance such as would suggest quasi-human pilots.
Jung observes that the uncanny properties attributed to flying objects — weightlessness, intelligence, impossibility — mark them as psychic projections rather than physical phenomena.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting
Clearly, flying in a small plane in a storm can be frightening. But that happens to many people who do not develop persistent anxiety and fear about flying. Something else may have been going on.
Shapiro uses a case of phobic fear of flying to illustrate how surface symptomatology masks deeper unprocessed memories, in this instance linking flight anxiety to parental separation and survivor guilt.
, Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy, 2012supporting
‘Let us marke their misteries and spels… First aske where the flying Eagle dwels.’ The alchemical eagle is sometimes referred to in the plural, and their number is anything from three to ten, according to the number of sublimations.
Abraham establishes that in the alchemical opus, the ‘flying eagle’ emblematizes the volatile mercurial substance ascending through successive sublimations — flying as chemical and spiritual ascent.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
‘When a flying dragon is in the sky, it is fitting to see the great man.’ Things with the same tonality resonate together; things with the same material force seek out one another.
The I Ching, in Wang Bi’s commentary, employs the flying dragon as the supreme image of virtue achieving its rightful cosmic position — aerial ascent as the expression of harmonious correspondence between inner excellence and heavenly order.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting
psuche takes wing and flies off like a dream. In Hades, the ghosts are eidOla, ‘images,’ insubsta[ntial].
Padel documents the Homeric usage in which the psyche, at death or in a faint, flies from the body like a dream — establishing flying as the primordial image of soul-departure and the threshold between life and Hades.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
I was flying in an airplane piloted by my husband. As he was flying, I was looking at the scenery below. Then I told him, Look, I see a polar bear under some water down there.
Hillman presents a dream in which aerial perspective reveals hidden depth (the submerged polar bear), using flying as the oneiric vantage point from which unconscious contents beneath the surface become visible.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
Major Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), and The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955).
Jung’s bibliographic citation of Flying Saucer literature signals his serious scholarly engagement with the UFO phenomenon as culturally and psychologically significant material.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964aside
transformation into [animal forms] 93, 94, 328f, 381, 385, 459f, 467, 477f; see also… falcon; fish; fly; fox; gander; goat; goose
Eliade’s index entry for shamanic animal transformations, including the fly, situates aerial creature-forms within the broader shamanic corpus of ecstatic shape-shifting and spirit-flight.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside
most people fear flying more than they do driving, in s[ituations where driving is objectively more dangerous].
Damasio invokes the irrationality of flight phobia as an instance of the body-based emotional biases that distort supposedly cool rational inference about risk.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994aside