Symbolism

Symbolism occupies a pivotal and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus. Jung’s foundational distinction — elaborated most precisely in Symbols of Transformation — between the sign and the symbol anchors the field’s entire therapeutic and hermeneutic enterprise: where a sign is a conventional abbreviation for something already known, a symbol is an indefinite expression pointing toward something not fully knowable, carrying a plurality of analogous variants proportional to its psychic depth. This distinction separates Jungian from Freudian practice: Freud’s dream-symbolism tends toward fixed semiotic substitution (staircase as sexual act), whereas Jung insists that genuine symbols arise autonomously from the unconscious and cannot be exhausted by any single referent. Neumann extends this into mythopoetic history, demonstrating how symbolic thinking structures the entire evolution of consciousness. Edinger applies it clinically, reading alchemical imagery as a living symbolic language for psychological transformation. Hillman complicates the picture by attending to the chromatic and material specificity of symbolic images, resisting premature abstraction. Eliade’s contribution from the history of religions — periodicity, regeneration, the sacred and the profane — situates symbolism within a cosmological frame that depth psychology draws upon but cannot fully contain. The central tension in the corpus is whether symbols are therapeutic instruments to be interpreted or living realities to be participated in — a tension that has never been resolved and that constitutes the generative heart of the field.

In the library 15 passages

A symbol is an indefinite expression with many meanings, pointing to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known. But the sign always has a fixed meaning, because it is a conventional abbreviation for, or a commonly accepted indication of, something known.

Jung establishes the foundational Jungian distinction between symbol and sign, grounding the entire depth-psychological hermeneutic on the symbol’s irreducible semantic plurality and its orientation toward the unconsciously unknown.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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Theologians sometimes even defend these ‘true’ religious symbols and symbolic doctrines against the discovery of a religious function in the unconscious psyche, forgetting that the values they fight for owe their existence to that very same function.

Jung argues that religious symbolism depends for its vitality on the unconscious psychic function that generates it, and that defending fixed symbolic forms against psychological inquiry is self-defeating.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Man and His Symbols, 1964thesis

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The drama of vegetation enters into the symbolism of the periodic regeneration of nature and man. Agriculture is only one of the planes upon which the symbolism of periodic regeneration applies.

Eliade demonstrates that regeneration symbolism operates across multiple cultural registers simultaneously, its lunar-mystical foundation making it irreducible to any single empirical plane such as agriculture.

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis

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These ‘mythological’ aspects are always present, even though in a given case they may be unconscious. If for instance one doesn’t happen to recall… that green is the colour of life and hope, the symbolic aspect of ‘green’ is nevertheless present as an unconscious sous-entendu.

Jung contends that symbolic valence inheres in objects and colours regardless of conscious awareness, demonstrating that symbolism operates as a permanent background layer of the psyche’s engagement with the world.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting

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It has long been known that all the instinctual forces of the psyche are involved in the formation of symbolic images, hence sexuality as well. Sex is not ‘symbolized’ in these images, but leaps to the eye.

Jung contests the Freudian reduction of symbolic images to sexual surrogates, arguing that sexuality is one instinctual contributor to symbol-formation rather than its concealed meaning.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting

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Teich contends that blue was repressed in Christian symbolism. It was not a canonical color as are violet, white, green, and black.

Hillman attends to the historically specific suppression of particular symbolic valences within institutional religion, showing that symbolic systems are shaped by cultural power as much as by archetypal necessity.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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Finally, in the last dream, I discovered an old library whose books were unknown to me… I opened one of the old volumes and found in it a profusion of the most marvellous symbolic pictures.

Jung narrates the autobiographical discovery of alchemical symbolic imagery as a synchronistic confirmation that the psyche spontaneously generates and recognises symbolic pictorial language across historical time.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting

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symbols: abstract 14, 18, 77-8, 82; cultural 14; and fantasy 79, 80, 81; healing power of 178; and individuation 82

Chodorow’s concordance locates symbols within the active imagination framework, linking their healing power directly to the individuation process and the mediation between fantasy and consciousness.

Chodorow, Joan, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997supporting

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religion, xvii, 90, 114, 147–48, 209, 215, 221, 326, 424; and amorphous psyche, 282–83; and hero archetype, 382; and mass man, 438; mystery religions, 146, 161, 188, 239n, 249, 253–54, 340n; and symbols, 369ff, 374, 377

Neumann’s index maps the relationship of symbols to religion, mystery traditions, and the hero archetype as structural nodes in the evolution of human consciousness.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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Looking at these details and their arrangement, I am not very happy with them as a piece of symbolism… The whole duality of the seven… is definitely not represented in this card.

Hamaker-Zondag applies a Jungian criterion of symbolic adequacy to tarot iconography, judging card designs by whether they successfully encode the archetypal tensions the symbols are meant to carry.

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

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To explain this typically Heideggerian paradox, he posited two categories of thinking: calculative and meditative.

Ulanov invokes Heidegger’s distinction between calculative and meditative thinking as a philosophical frame for understanding why symbolic — meditative — apprehension is increasingly foreclosed in modern consciousness.

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

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It is fair to say that there is no group of ideas that is incapable of representing sexual facts and wishes.

Freud’s assertion of universal sexual representability in dream imagery illustrates the semiotic rather than symbolic orientation of classical psychoanalysis, providing the contrast against which Jung’s symbol theory defines itself.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900aside

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