Jung is drawing a line that most people, when they first encounter it, want to erase. We are so trained in the management of meaning — in naming, categorizing, deploying — that a symbol looks to us like a sign we haven't deciphered yet. The frustration of the unknown image feels like a problem of insufficient information, and the reflex is to supply what's missing: look it up, find the standard interpretation, close the gap. But that reflex is precisely what a symbol refuses. You cannot close the gap because the gap is the symbol's life. What you are encountering isn't encrypted meaning waiting to be decoded; it is something that has not yet become meaning, something that cannot without loss be translated into what is "perfectly well known."

The second consequence is harder. If the symbol has a life of its own that guides — if it eases the task, in Jung's quiet phrase — then you are not in charge of the process. You can attend, you can wait, you can hold the image rather than immediately converting it. But you cannot fabricate the experience by wanting it. This is not mysticism; it is a precise statement about the limits of will in psychological work. The symbol arrives from the side of the psyche that your intentions do not govern, and it arrives only when it does.