The symbol-image distinction stands as one of the most generative conceptual fault-lines within the depth-psychological tradition, marking the passage from Jung’s classical framework to the post-Jungian revisions championed most forcefully by James Hillman. Jung himself established the foundational contrast between sign and symbol—the former referring to what is already known, the latter pointing toward unknown psychic content that cannot be adequately rendered in direct statement—and posited that the symbolic process is inherently an experience in images and of images. Yet this very derivation of symbol from image carries a cost: as Samuels documents, the third generation of analytical psychologists, under Hillman’s influence, perceived that the abstraction of symbol from image had effectively erased image’s ‘characteristic peculiarity and plenitude.’ Where Jungian symbolism elevates the image to a vehicle of transcendent meaning, archetypal psychology insists that the image be allowed to stand as presence rather than representation. Hillman’s reading of the Council of Nicaea (787 CE) provides the historical coordinates: the ecclesiastical subordination of image to doctrine mirrors the psychological subordination of image to symbol. Giegerich complicates this further, noting that imaginal psychology’s rejection of Jung’s archetype-in-itself/archetypal image split nonetheless reproduces a structurally analogous metaphysical dualism. The tension between symbolic transcendence and imaginal immanence remains unresolved—and productively so—across the corpus.
by abstracting symbol from image, image has got lost. For present-day analysts the symbol is not as mysterious as it was. Symbols have become ‘stand-ins for concepts’
Samuels, following Hillman, argues that Jung’s abstraction of symbol from image has impoverished both, reducing the symbol to conceptual currency and losing the irreducible specificity of the image itself.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
Jung’s initial differentiation between ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ has been extended to make a distinction between ‘symbol’ and ‘image’.
Samuels identifies the post-Jungian theoretical movement as a second-order differentiation that takes Jung’s sign/symbol axis and extends it into a new symbol/image opposition, driving the shift from classical to archetypal psychology.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
There a careful distinction was formulated about the nature of images and the correct relation to them.
Hillman invokes the Council of Nicaea as the historical archetype for the theological-and-psychological subordination of images to representational meaning, framing iconoclasm as the deep cultural root of the symbol-image confusion.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
images became allegories. When images become allegories, the iconoclasts have won. The image itself has become subtly depotentiated.
Hillman argues that once images are made to point beyond themselves to abstract meanings, they lose autonomous presence and become mere vehicles of doctrine—precisely the danger he locates in symbolic over-determination.
, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975thesis
Imaginal psychology refused to go along with JUNG’s distinction between the ‘archetype-in-itself’ and the ‘archetypal image.’ I concede, there are convincing reasons why this distinction should be left behind.
Giegerich concedes the post-Jungian critique of Jung’s metaphysical background/foreground split while also tracing how rejecting that distinction creates its own structural problems for imaginal psychology.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
here HILLMAN unwittingly reverts to a distinction that is exactly parallel to JUNG’s distinction between the ‘archetype-in-itself’ and the ‘archetypal image,’ in other words, a distinction that archetypal psychology had expressly rejected on systematic grounds.
Giegerich demonstrates that Hillman’s own concept of a god as separable from its particular cultic forms reproduces the very archetype-in-itself/archetypal image split that archetypal psychology claimed to have overcome.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
the symbolic image ‘points to a meaning that is beyond description’. For Jung a symbol is not a sign; that refers to what is already known
Samuels summarizes Jung’s foundational sign/symbol distinction, establishing the ground from which the subsequent symbol/image distinction departs.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
The reductive fallacy makes the opposite mistake. In this case, the significance of the symbol is missed by misunderstanding it only as a sign for some other known content.
Edinger distinguishes the concretistic fallacy (literalizing the symbol) from the reductive fallacy (reducing symbol to sign), implicitly defending the necessity of maintaining the symbol’s irreducibility against both over- and under-interpretation.
, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972supporting
symbol = value + image… the content of the image accounts for only one-fourth of the elements of the symbol. The other three are not only less tangible than the contents, but also resist reduction.
Ulanov formalizes the symbol-image relationship algebraically, arguing that image is a necessary but insufficient component of symbol, which additionally requires energy, archetype, and form.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting
while acknowledging the experiential and phenomenological identity between God-image and symbol of the self, Jung also maintains a strict conceptual distinction between the self and God ‘as such’.
Papadopoulos notes Jung’s methodological care in holding apart experiential/imaginal identity from conceptual distinction, illustrating how the image/symbol tension operates within Jung’s own epistemological restraint.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006aside
The image may be either personal or impersonal in origin. In the latter case it is collective and is also distinguished by mythological qualities. I then term it a primordial image.
Jung distinguishes image, primordial image, and idea in his own typological glossary, providing the conceptual scaffolding within which the later symbol-image distinction would be articulated.
, Psychological Types, 1921aside