Symbolic language occupies a contested but foundational position across the depth-psychology corpus, where it designates not merely a mode of expression but the constitutive medium through which psychic life becomes intelligible. Jung establishes the paradigmatic claim: dream-images must be understood symbolically rather than literally, and this principle ramifies throughout his entire metapsychology—from the collective unconscious and archetypes to alchemy and the transcendent function. For Jung, symbolic language is the native tongue of the unconscious, irreducible to sign or allegory. Lacan, approaching from structural linguistics, reformulates this axiom structurally: the unconscious is itself organized like a language, and psychoanalysis is founded on a theory of the symbol—a position Benveniste complicates by insisting that language is not merely symbolic but that all symbolism realizes itself necessarily within a particular langue. Von Franz, reading alchemical texts, charts the historical degeneration from living symbolic language into mere allegory, marking a loss of genuine symbolic experience. McGilchrist adds a neurological dimension, arguing that the right hemisphere apprehends symbolic complexity which the left hemisphere’s drive toward precision can only flatten. The central tension running through this literature is between symbolic language as a generative, multi-valent medium pointing toward what cannot be said directly, and the reductive impulse—whether clinical, logical, or allegorical—to domesticate it into transparent sign.
one of the basic principles of analytical psychology is that dream-images are to be understood symbolically; that is to say, one must not take them literally, but must surmise a hidden meaning in them.
Jung establishes the foundational axiom of depth psychology: symbolic language in dreams requires interpretive penetration rather than literal reading, anchoring the entire project of analytical psychology.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
Toute la psychanalyse est fondée sur une théorie du symbole. Or, le langage n’est que symbolisme.
Benveniste locates the entire psychoanalytic enterprise within a theory of the symbol, then insists that language itself is nothing other than symbolism, while marking the crucial divergence between unconscious and linguistic symbolisms.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
Still others used symbolic language but no chemistry. You could say that, on the whole, doubt started about the time of the Renaissance, after which alchemical symbolism became an allegory, no longer a genuine symbolic experience.
Von Franz distinguishes living symbolic language, in which the symbol participates in the reality it names, from allegorical language, which merely illustrates a pre-known meaning—marking a historical deterioration of symbolic consciousness.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis
At the outset of Liber Novus, Jung experiences a crisis of language. The spirit of the depths, who immediately challenges Jung’s use of language along with the spirit of the time, informs Jung that on the terrain of his soul his achieved language will no longer serve.
The Red Book editors identify Jung’s confrontation with the inadequacy of ordinary language before inner experience as the generative crisis out of which his symbolic language for the unconscious is forged.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
Or ce phénomène humain, la culture, est un phénomène entièrement symbolique. La culture se définit comme un ensemble très complexe de représentations, organisées par un code de relations et de valeurs.
Benveniste grounds symbolic language in the anthropological claim that culture itself is entirely symbolic, constituted by a complex of representations governed by codes of relation and value.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
Lacan went beyond the proposition that the unconscious is a structure that lies beneath the conscious world; the unconscious itself is structured, like a language.
Samuels maps Lacan’s structural claim—the unconscious is organized like a language—onto Jungian territory, proposing an alignment between Lacan’s Symbolic order and Jung’s archetypal collective unconscious.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
Intermediate action tendencies involve the use of symbols, including language. Some intermediate action tendencies are reflexive, and involve impulsive beliefs. Others are more reflective.
In the structural-dissociation framework, language is positioned within a developmental hierarchy of symbolic action tendencies, with command of symbolic language indexing the mental level available to traumatized parts.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
The left hemisphere may add – and it adds enormously much – but what is added must be returned to the world that is grounded by the right hemisphere, or we misconceive the nature of reality.
McGilchrist argues that language’s symbolic precision, a left-hemisphere achievement, must remain grounded in the right hemisphere’s grasp of embodied reality or it distorts rather than illuminates.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
language is neither necessary for communication – not even for some highly sophisticated kinds of communication; nor for thinking – not even for some highly sophisticated kinds of thinking.
McGilchrist challenges the equation of language with thought, implying that symbolic language in its fullest sense exceeds the propositional and communicative functions to which it is commonly reduced.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
We believe we have understood ‘symbolism’ as the most important means for adjustment to reality, in the sense that every ‘comfort’ that civilization and technical knowledge continually strive to increase only tries to replace by durable substitutes the primal goal.
Rank frames symbolism as the primary mechanism of adaptation to reality, connecting symbolic language to the compensatory logic by which civilization substitutes durable signs for inaccessible primal objects.
, The Trauma of Birth, 1924supporting
the language is itself a semiological system. It is, hierarchically, the first amongst them.
Benveniste establishes language as the master semiological interpretant—the system that grounds and legitimates all other symbolic systems, including those encountered in clinical and cultural practice.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
even sustained human attempts to teach primates to communicate using a symbolic language of any kind have resulted in at best very limited success, as with Washoe, a chimpanzee who after years of training eventually mastered around 130 symbols, without any recognisable syntax.
McGilchrist uses comparative primate research to mark the uniqueness of human symbolic language, defined by syntax and vast vocabulary rather than mere sign recognition.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside
if we ask further for a symbolical art-form to express this idea, we have to look for it in the chief structures built by the Egyptians.
Derrida, citing Hegel on Egyptian architecture, offers an aside on symbolic art-form as the expression of ideas not yet fully articulable in conceptual language, situating symbolic language at the threshold between image and concept.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside