The nose occupies a surprisingly varied position within the depth-psychology corpus, appearing across registers that range from the clinical-symbolic to the cosmological and the meditationally practical. In Bleuler’s foundational psychiatric observations, the nose functions as a polysemous symbol capable of representing either male or female genitalia within the same patient, a finding corroborated by Jung’s association experiments in which a subject linked the word ‘nose’ to everything sexually charged. This overdetermination of the organ marks it as a site of somatic symbolism par excellence. Onians traces a more archaic stratum in which the nose is the passage through which the soul departs and through which spirits enter, connecting sneezing to prophetic and pneumatic traditions across Greek, Jewish, and Hindu sources. The I Ching tradition introduces a strikingly different valence: in the hexagram Biting Through, the disappearance of the nose into meat signals forceful moral resolve rather than embarrassment. Chinese contemplative literature, via Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower, employs ‘the tip of the nose’ as a focal point for meditational attention while cautioning against literalism. Hillman, in a characteristically lateral move, suggests that smell — and by extension the nose as its organ — may provide a better analogy for psychological image-sensing than either sight or hearing, by virtue of its simultaneously concrete and elusive character. Together, these passages establish the nose as a threshold organ: between inside and outside, between body and soul, between the literal and the symbolic.
the nose can be both the male and female organ, even in the same patient. Women who have to be tube-fed through the nasal passage often complain that they are being sexually abused.
Bleuler demonstrates, with clinical evidence and reference to Jung’s association experiments, that the nose functions as a polysemous somatic symbol encompassing both genital poles within schizophrenic symbolism.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911thesis
‘Sneezing is the result of a Bhut entering or leaving the nose, the latter being the view most generally accepted. The belief dates from early times.’
Onians documents a cross-cultural archaic belief in which the nose serves as the threshold through which spirits and souls pass, linking the sneeze to pneumatic and prophetic traditions.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
The two founders of Buddhism and Taoism have taught that one should look at the tip of ones nose. But they did not mean that one should fasten ones thoughts to the tip of the nose.
Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower presents the tip of the nose as a traditional meditational focal point while insisting on its purely instrumental, non-literal function in inward contemplation.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931thesis
The sense of smell alone may be a better analogy for image-sensing than both seeing and hearing together, because smell is both more concrete, and less.
Hillman elevates the olfactory organ above sight and hearing as the proper analogue for depth-psychological image-perception, arguing that the nose’s mode of apprehension captures the simultaneously literal and elusive quality of psychic images.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
For the Kabbalah with its anthropomorphic conceptions of deity the Spirit ‘proceedeth from the concealed brain into the gallery of the nostrils’. In the seventeenth century sneezing was regarded as a ‘motion of the brain’.
Onians traces the nose/nostril as the anatomical channel of divine spirit in Kabbalistic anthropology and early-modern physiology, reinforcing the nose’s role as the conduit between pneuma and embodied consciousness.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
He stuck it into his nose and climbed to the top of the lodge centrepole and said, ‘Kowank, kowank, kowank!’ Then he pecked at the upper part of the pole and made a loud sound. He knocked the awl into his nose and made himself unconscious.
In Radin’s Winnebago Trickster cycle, the nose becomes the site of self-wounding performance and comic shamanic mimicry, underscoring the organ’s liminal and transgressive symbolic charge.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Six in the second place: a) Bites through tender meat, So that his nose disappears. No blame.
The I Ching hexagram Biting Through employs the image of the nose disappearing into meat as a figure for fierce, blameless moral resolve and the force required to administer just punishment.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
Six in the second place: a) Bites through tender meat, So that his nose disappears. No blame. b) “Bites through tender meat, so th
This parallel Wilhelm-Baynes rendering of the same I Ching line confirms the nose’s symbolic disappearance as an image of resolute, justified action in the hexagram Biting Through.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
mie bi in this line means burying the nose. Nevertheless, here the criminal case is more serious than that represented by the bottom line. The executive’s resolution is firm.
Huang’s I Ching commentary explicates the ‘burying of the nose’ as an emblem of firm executive resolve in punishment, treating the nose as a measure of forceful moral commitment rather than literal mutilation.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
He not only spoke through the nose, but by means of the no
Hillman’s anecdotal portrait of Kerényi’s lecturing style uses the nose as a wry metonymic detail, the fragment suggesting the organ’s role as an instrument of revelatory, hermeneutically-charged speech.
, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944aside
let the breathing through the nose be made rhythmical and the thoughts fixed on the dark door.
The Secret of the Golden Flower prescribes rhythmic nasal breathing as a foundational technique of Taoist inner alchemy, situating the nose as the somatic gateway to contemplative transformation.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931supporting
A sneeze would naturally be traced to something inside the head, be regarded as a spontaneous expression of that something, independent of the body and t
Onians argues that the sneeze — expulsion through the nose — was interpreted in archaic Greek and Jewish thought as a spontaneous utterance of the soul resident in the head, linking nasal function to prophetic consciousness.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting