Reduction is not interpretation — it is termination. When the shofar becomes "merely" a ram's horn, the interpretive act has succeeded in the most catastrophic way possible: it has answered the question by dissolving the thing that was asking it. The symbol dies not from neglect but from explanation, from the achievement of transparency. This is what the reductive method does when it runs all the way through: it arrives at the bottom of the thing and finds only biology, only history, only function — and calls that finding knowledge.

But Jung's second sentence is the harder one. Symbolization is not sentiment applied afterward, not a pious refusal to look. It is a specific movement the soul makes when it encounters an object with more energy than the object can account for. The ram's horn does not become the shofar because someone decides to treat it reverently. It becomes the shofar when something in the encounter exceeds what horn-ness can hold — when the object starts carrying a weight the ego did not assign and cannot withdraw. The symbol is not a meaning draped over a thing. It is what a thing becomes when the psyche is genuinely implicated in it, when looking at it costs something.