The mandala image is not only a symbol of wholeness and healing, but can be actively employed as a means towards that end. Jung first discovered this in his own case and later confirmed this discovery through the spontaneous production of similar images by his patients. The mandalas drawn by his patients suggested to Jung, not just a representation of a state of psychic wholeness, but rather the striving to overcome inner chaos, and the search for some form of integration. Just as, for the yogi, the mandala offers a means of overcoming the opposites of spirit and matter, so, for his patients, the use of mandala drawings expressed a need to resolve psychological tensions, and acted as 'an antidote for chaotic states of mind' (CW9i.16).
— J. J. Clarke
Jung's phrase "antidote for chaotic states of mind" is worth slowing down on. An antidote neutralizes a poison; it does not transform the organism. That is a more modest claim than wholeness, and probably the more honest one. What the mandala actually does, in the clinical record Jung built from his patients' spontaneous drawings, is give chaos a rim — it places the unbearable proliferation of inner contents inside a circumference, so that what was flooding can be beheld. Beholding is not resolution. The tensions Clarke names — spirit against matter, integration against fragmentation — do not disappear inside the circle. They become visible as tensions rather than as pure overwhelm.
The trouble comes when the image gets promoted from antidote to destination. Wholeness is a compelling idea precisely because it promises that the striving will eventually end, that the chaos was temporary, that somewhere ahead the opposites complete each other and hold still. Jung's own language encouraged this reading, and it remains the dominant one. But the drawings themselves tell a slightly different story: a psyche that keeps making mandalas is a psyche still in motion, still encountering the chaos, not one that has resolved it. The circle is a form of attention, not a form of arrival.
J. J. Clarke·Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient·1994