Symbolic Dimension

The symbolic dimension, as treated across the depth-psychology corpus, designates that register of psychic and cultural life in which images, figures, and forms carry a surplus of meaning irreducible to their literal or empirical content. The literature is unified in insisting that symbols are not signs: where a sign exhausts its content in a one-to-one correspondence, the symbol opens onto an inexhaustible surplus that resists full conceptual capture. Jung’s formulation — that symbolic images are essentially irreducible, that their meaning is synergetic and transcends the particulars composing them — stands as the theoretical anchor, developed with particular rigor by Ulanov through the language of chaos mathematics and strange attractors. Edinger, Kalsched, and Corbin each press the notion from different directions: Edinger traces it through the God-image’s self-differentiation; Kalsched locates the ‘third, symbolic possibility’ as the therapeutic goal in trauma work; Corbin places it in the esoteric hermeneutic capacity (ta’wīl) to actualize the latent potency of sacred text. A crucial tension runs through the corpus between those who regard the symbolic dimension as a function of the collective unconscious projected outward (Jung, Samuels on Lacan) and those who insist it inheres in the phenomena themselves (Corbin, the religious phenomenologists). The stakes are high: whether the symbolic dimension is ultimately anthropological or ontological determines the entire therapeutic and metaphysical program of depth psychology.

In the library 12 passages

to discern the meaning of a symbolic image, we must read between the lines. This comes pretty close to the concept of fractal dimension, which either fits in between or transcends the traditional boundaries of logic. And like fractal attractors, symbolic images are essentially irreducible.

This passage establishes the symbolic dimension as structurally analogous to fractal geometry — irreducible, synergetic, and transcendent of the logical categories used to analyze its parts.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971thesis

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this ‘third’ (symbolic) possibility is named ‘Joy’ and it defines a new birth at the end of a great struggle involving many sacrifices – sacrifices of identification with numinous, archetypal realities.

Kalsched identifies the symbolic dimension as a transformative third term in trauma work, distinct from both the daimonic and the purely literal, enabling the ego to relate to the numinous without identification.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis

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symbol = energy + archetype + form + content. The beauty of using an equation to define symbols is that it respects the dynamics that define symbols. In the above equation, the content of the image accounts for only one-fourth of the elements of the symbol.

Ulanov formally articulates the multi-dimensional composition of the symbol, arguing that its literal content is only one of four constitutive elements, the other three resisting reduction.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971thesis

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Lacan divides the phenomena with which psychoanalysis deals into three ‘orders’: (1) the Symbolic, which structures the unconscious by a fundamental and universal set of laws; (2) the Imaginary… (3) the Real.

Samuels maps Lacan’s tripartite orders onto Jungian categories, positioning the Symbolic order as the universal structural dimension that governs unconscious life and parallels Jung’s archetypal collective unconscious.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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Knowing how symbols work allows us to decide how we would like to participate, if at all, in our own development… the Jungian interpretation of symbols can be boiled down to a simple formula, namely: image is meaning is explanation.

Ulanov critiques the tendency within Jungian practice to collapse the symbolic dimension into a static equivalence between image and meaning, arguing instead for attention to the mechanics of symbolic functioning.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting

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The horizontal axis of our empirical consciousness, which except for psychic contents is aware only of bodies in motion, is crossed by another order of being, a dimension of the ‘psychic’.

Jung explicitly posits a vertical or ‘psychic’ dimension that intersects the horizontal axis of empirical consciousness, providing the ontological basis for the symbolic dimension as a crossing of orders.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting

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it may be that geocentrism should be meditated upon and evaluated essentially after the manner of the construction of a mandala. It is this mandala upon which we should meditate in order to find again the northern dimension with its symbolic power.

Corbin argues that cosmological orientation recovers its meaning only when apprehended through the symbolic dimension, illustrated by the mandala as a structure that opens the ‘northern’ or interior-spiritual axis.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

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being drawn toward something that resists definition feels like being the object of an intention other than one’s own… Science looks to the individual… Religion, on the other hand, locates agency in the suprapersonal.

Ulanov frames the symbolic dimension as the locus of an unresolved tension between psychological and religious epistemologies, each offering a different account of where symbolic agency resides.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting

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Symbols combine with symbols to give symbols of ‘second degree’… The truly intuitive person will recognize the absoluteness of this logic on internal evidence… the power to identify themselves with the wholeness of the wholes, and to release the significance of these wholes in terms of true and compelling symbols.

Rudhyar posits that the symbolic dimension operates through a holistic, non-analytical logic accessible only to intuitive perception capable of identifying with the wholeness of phenomena.

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting

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working with the symbolism and hidden depths of the tarot is nothing less than learning to dance to the rhythms of the cosmos. The Power of Symbolism.

Hamaker-Zondag treats engagement with the symbolic dimension of the Tarot as a process of psychological self-knowledge that opens onto a cosmic register of meaning beyond prediction.

Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot, 1997supporting

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Heidegger certainly thought so. He proposed that, even though we have the capacity to think, we are growing increasingly thoughtless, to the degree that ‘man today [1955] is in flight from thinking.’

Ulanov invokes Heidegger’s critique of calculative versus meditative thinking as a philosophical framing of why the symbolic dimension is inaccessible to modern consciousness oriented toward utility.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971aside

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