Jung is drawing a line here that most therapeutic culture immediately erases. The symbol is not a code; it is not ciphertext waiting for the analyst's key. It belongs to the domain of what is still forming — which means any translation of it into something already known is a destruction, not an interpretation. When a dream image gets reduced to "that's your mother complex," the analogy has been killed off in favor of a category, and the symbol's work — its actual forward-pointing labor — goes unfinished.

The pull toward reduction is not laziness. It is the pneumatic preference wearing intellectual clothing: the desire to arrive at clarity, to stand above the image and name it from a position of comprehension. That standing-above feels like understanding, but Jung is precise that what it actually does is substitute the known for the yet-to-be. The symbol was pointing somewhere the ego cannot yet see. Reduction closes the pointing.

Hermeneutic significance — holding the symbol's meaning as genuinely open, following its analogies rather than arresting them — is the less comfortable posture. It means staying in the domain of the unknown for as long as the image requires. What emerges from that staying is not clarity in the usual sense. It is something more like encounter.