The Symbolic Quest

Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology - Expanded Edition

Edward C. Whitmont

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691213187
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoanálisis

This book explores the use and development of man's symbolizing capacities-those qualities that make him distinctly human. Dr. Whitmont describes the symbolic approach to a dream, which takes into account a symptom's meaning in reference to an unfolding wholeness of personality. He then presents the view that the instinctual urge for meaning is served by the symbolizing capacities, and that this urge has been repressed in our time. In the field of psychology, this symbolic approach is most fully exemplified by the theories of C. G. Jung. The author's contribution includes many differentiations and speculations, especially concerning the problems of relatedness.

1. The Symbolic Approach

TWENTIETH CENTURY PSYCHOLOGY, in its concern with depth analysis, and twentieth century physics have begun to direct man’s attention toward the use of symbols as a helpful means of comprehending and making use of the non-rational and intuitive realms of functioning. In analytical psychology, Jung’s development of new symbolic categories can be compared with a similar approach initiated by the modern physicist. In both cases the subject matter defies comprehension in accustomed rational categories; hence symbolic “working models” or working hypotheses, such as the archetype or the atom, had to be set up in order to describe as adequately as possible the way an otherwise indescribable unknown acts in the world of matter. Thus the structure of the atom can be represented by the construction of an orderly arrangement, in model form, of its theoretical components—nucleus and electrons—whose existence can be deduced from observable data. In a similar manner, the totality of the human psyche, of which consciousness is but an aspect, can be dealt with scientifically through the formulation of a system of postulated elements whose existence can be deduced from observable data. We will return to this subject later when discussing the scientific acceptability of the symbolic approach.

Like the atom the psyche and its elements are not physical objects that can be seen or touched, but unlike the atom they cannot even be made to fit the conditions of laboratory testing and statistical evaluation. We cannot speak of the psyche as a thing that is or does this or that. At best we can speak of it indirectly by describing human behavior—the behavior of others and also our own subjective experience—as if it expressed aspects of a hypothetical pattern of meaning, as if a potential, encompassing wholeness were ordering the action of the parts. For instance, we can recognize that an autonomous impulse or a hitherto hidden personality pattern has emerged and behaved as if it intended a certain action which was meaningful in relation to that total personality. The most basic hypothesis about the human psyche with which we deal here, then, is that of a pattern of wholeness that can only be described symbolically.

To illustrate: a woman who buys everything she can find in the shape of a butterfly or decorated with butterflies is caught by an urge that calls for symbolic understanding. In this case, a butterfly may be expressive of her strong inner need to emerge from a confining cocoon, perhaps a cocoon of old protective attitudes. Or a young man whose unrecognized urge is to exercise great power over people may want to become an analyst and he may be able to give all kinds of exemplary, conscious reasons for wanting to. If the symbolic nature of his urge—namely to gain power over himself rather than over others—is not discovered, his influence will be most unfortunate. (This is also one of the reasons why an analyst must himself be analyzed.) Or a humanities student may suddenly change his field to regional planning. His urge to “save” the world, to reorganize and order society, can be understood as if it expressed his own inner need for rescue and for organization. Whether this “choice” of occupation is also valid on the outer plane will be discovered as it is lived. If it is only symbolic of an unrecognized inner state, it will eventually run into snags in the concrete world. The student is likely to be a more effective planner if he becomes aware of this kind of meaning in his choice of profession and if he can separate the two endeavors, although he may first have to work the problem through in terms of the form in which he sees it in the outside world. In this way he can test his ego strength against something concrete and thus prepare himself to have some voice in the optimum development of his own inner regions.

This symbolic approach can mediate an experience of something indefinable, intuitive or imaginative, or a feeling-sense of something that can be known or conveyed in no other way, since abstract terms do not suffice everywhere. While to most people in our time the only comprehensible approach to reality lies in defining everything by means of literal, abstract, impersonal conceptualizations, it is this challenge to and reliance upon the intuitive and emotional faculties that constitute the fundamentally new character of Jung’s approach. Indeed he held these faculties to be indispensable for an adequate experiencing of the psyche, for it is only by means of all its elements that we can attempt to understand the psyche. This approach opens new doors, but it also raises potential obstacles for the newcomer to these concepts who has as yet no personal experience in the depths of the unconscious areas of the psyche.

The difficulties that the average contemporary encounters in attempting to grasp the symbolic approach rest upon the fact that, in response to the mystical introverted trend and the later ecclesiastical obscurantism of the Middle Ages, recent Western development has overstressed abstract, rational thought. It has concerned itself predominantly with the practical utilization of external things and external needs and has in our day culminated in fact- and logic-oriented positivism. It has largely disregarded—or at least relegated to a position of lesser importance—the emotional and intuitive sides of man. Hence the capacity to feel (which is the capacity to experience a conscious relationship to emotion—emotion itself being the impulse, an autonomous force) and the capacity to intuit (that is, the capacity to perceive through other means than our five senses) have not been given adequate moral value or conscious scrutiny; feelings are regarded as something that can be dispensed with, intuitions are not considered as “real.” This is an approach which fails to help us toward the understanding of basic motivation; for ethos, morality and meaningfulness of existence rest basically upon emotional and intuitive foundations. These areas may be secondarily rationalized, but mere reason alone never touches or moves them; were it otherwise the scientists and philosophers would long ago have reformed mankind. We see in all the lives around us how ineffective rational appeals are in comparison with emotional ones. Our culture is logic-oriented but in dealing with our most fundamental problems rational logic fails to offer us adequate answers to the understanding and living of life.

In our time this extraverted rationalism has gone to such an extreme that it has been remarked that “not only the occidental Western world but the whole of humanity is in danger of losing its soul to the external things of life. Our extraverted forces of the intellect are so much concerned with adequate feeding and hygienic care of the underdeveloped parts of the world, as well as with raising our standard of living, that the irrational functions, the heart and the soul, are more and more threatened with atrophy.”¹

Some of the results of this one-sided emphasis are the individual and mass neuroses of our time, with the ever-latent danger of explosive eruptions. Addictions to alcohol, narcotics and the “mind-expanding drugs” also express a search for emotional experiences which in the course of our extreme intellectualization have become lost. But it is not only the drug- and alcohol-addiction; “work-addiction,” the “manager disease,” the compulsive need of always having to do something in order to appear busy, also indicates the inability of modern man to find a meaning in life.

This traditional devaluation and neglect of emotion and intuition in favor of outer world-directed reason has left Western man without an adequate cultivation of conscious modes of orienting himself in the inner psychic world of emotion, ethos and meaning; for what is not consciously developed remains primitive and regressive and may constitute a threat.

Consequently most of our contemporaries have no way of recognizing intuitive or feeling responses, either in another person or in themselves. It is very difficult for today’s typical intellectual to discover a way out of the unbalanced psychic state in which he eventually finds himself, for even the most intense experiences can appear to the “thinking man” to be meaningless. As James Baldwin has put it: “. . . the occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people have not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said they had died —through any of their terrible events.”²

In the face of this impasse it was Jung’s concern, and indeed the very point of parting with Freud, to show that intuition and emotion and the capacity to apperceive and create by way of symbols are basic modes of human functioning, no less so than perception through the sense organs and through thinking.

A genuine symbol in Jung’s terms is not a freely chosen, abstract designation attached to a specified object by convention (such as verbal or mathematical signs) but is the expression of a spontaneous experience which points beyond itself to a meaning not conveyed by a rational term, owing to the latter’s intrinsic limitation. Jung defines a symbol as “the best description, or formula, of a relatively unknown fact; a fact, however, which is none the less recognized or postulated as existing.”³ “(It) is not an arbitrary or intentional sign standing for a known and conceivable fact, but an admittedly anthropomorphic—hence limited and only partly valid—expression for something suprahuman and only partly conceivable. It may be the best expression possible, yet it ranks below the level of the mystery it seeks to describe.”⁴

These definitions indicate that the full range of functioning rests not merely upon the need to answer rational, logical questions such as “How?” “Wherefrom?” and “What for?” but also upon a search for significance: “What does it mean?” Therefore it is important to differentiate between a true symbol, in the sense of our definition, and an allegory or metaphor that may point to rationally conceivable facts or to dynamics of the personal unconscious.

Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an abbreviated design for a known thing is semiotic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which cannot for that reason be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic.⁵

An expression that stands for a known thing always remains merely a sign, and is never a symbol. It is, therefore, quite impossible to make a living symbol, i.e., one that is pregnant with meaning, from known associations.⁶

In the following quotation, Heyer expresses the unique importance of the symbol (in this case, the symbol of creative potency) and comments on the ease with which we can misunderstand or ignore it:

Let us assume someone dreams of so-called phallic objects. The old method of psychoanalysis would have seen in this only repressed, and [in other words] disfigured images for the penis. This can . . . very well be the case, but it need not. The tower, the obelisk, the church steeple, the sword, the lance, the knife, etc., can represent for the dreamer the not yet dared male potency, sensu strictiori, that is, sex. This then would become the object of analysis.

But we do not want to forget that the genital function and the members of the body assigned to it are not the only emanations of the manly and masculine, the brave, the constant, upright, aggressive, etc.

The genital potency is only one, namely a personal actualization of this principle—that is, of the masculine pole in the sense of both mundane and cosmic total being; as represented, for instance, in towers.

Whoever recognizes in the dreamed or actual tower, obelisk or sword only the “repressed” membrum virile, is actually blind to the fact that the inner world of man in a state of trouble produces these images of the potentia erecta because only thereby can those larger, more powerful and all-inclusive and—in the truest sense—significant entities and realities be evoked, which mediate to us the meaning, the inner being of these qualities rife with symbolism.

Whoever reduces the image to a disfigured substitute for something else degrades it, and misunderstands the secret indications; better, neglects them or rather neglects to perceive the potent symbol hidden under private covers. If, however, one extracts the real core of the image, one thereby helps to make contact with that power inherent and living within the symbol—a power that “can move mountains.”

For symbols are not merely representational forms which serve our cognition, but rather they are highly potent powers. This becomes clear at once when we consider what effects symbols can produce, as for instance flags, with their symbolic signs—the cross or the crescent —what world-shaking deeds are connected with these!⁷

In practical terms, Jung’s method of interpreting spontaneous symbols of the unconscious never attempts to say that a human situation is such and such, but rather that these images describe the situation itself in the form of analogies or parables. The symbolic approach by definition points beyond itself and beyond what can be made immediately accessible to our observation. While this approach is not abstract or rational, neither can it be regarded as irrational; rather it has laws and a structure of its own which correspond to the structural laws of emotion and intuitive realization.⁸

Perhaps before discussing the symbolic experience further in its epistemological, philosophical and practical terminological implications, an example of the symbolic approach to a dream might be given to illustrate how this approach functions in a therapeutic situation. This patient had undergone previous psychotherapy which had not been based on Jung’s symbolic approach but. upon the traditional symptomatic approach. I do not, of course, mean to imply that a failure of psychotherapeutic efforts proves that the approach has been wrong. There are many factors involved, to be discussed in later chapters, foremost among them the personal relationship between therapist and patient. However, this case was unique, didactically classical, as are most of those I shall use here as examples. It is rare for a sudden dramatic change in a patient’s attitude to occur through a single insight; however, this patient did experience immediate release from his neurotic impasse. Thus his case appears particularly suitable for demonstrating the concrete effects of a different line of therapeutic approach.

The symptomatic approach of which I spoke—as opposed to the symbolic one—viewed the patient’s reaction pattern merely as a deviation from normal sexuality, falling into a certain classification, in need of correction and presumably caused by specific disturbances. While all of this was quite correct, namely in terms of an abstract system of classification, it nevertheless omitted to ask what in practical terms turned out to be the most important question, namely the question of the meaningfulness of the unknown message which was inherent in his strange compulsion.

There are two possible approaches to the problems and disturbances which life presents. We can see them as symptomatic deviations from a desired normalcy of “what things should be like,” caused by some wrongness and hence the expressions of trouble or illness. We can on the other hand suspect that the known facts may attempt to point further and deeper, to a development still called for and a meaningfulness so far unrealized. Only then do we think or live not merely symptomatically but also symbolically. The realization of that meaning which has so far been missed might then point toward a cure.

The patient was a businessman in his middle thirties who came to me in a state of panic; he had been plagued since the beginning of sexual maturity by what had been diagnostically classified as fetishism, with a masochistic component. He was unable to function sexually with any woman except through first licking or kissing her feet. In order to accomplish sexual arousal he had to prostrate himself before his partner, caress and kiss her feet and gradually, as it were, work his way upwards. Any attempt to avoid this path of approach would always result in sexual impotence. During one of his initial analytic interviews, he told the following recurrent dream:

“I saw a dagger, sickle-shaped and silvery, and I was told that this was the weapon that would kill or had killed Siegfried, and there was the implication of a threat that this weapon might also kill me.”

As this man became more and more worried about his “perversion” and his neurotic tensions, which made adequate relationships with women rather impossible, his impotence increased. The interpretation he had been given previously was in terms of a masochistic tendency, a wish to punish or humiliate himself for his aggressions, based on a serious conflict situation with his parents, notably his mother. The recurrent dream could be made to fit fairly well with this interpretation, namely as an urge to self-destruction or self-castration. Of course, one might ask further questions. Why the worshipping just of the feet? Why the fancy image of the dagger? Why did these insights and the previous therapy based upon this interpretation do nothing to help him?

If one interprets the patient’s manifestations symbolically, in Jung’s fashion, one might assume that his symptoms reveal a psychic demand requiring that he worship at the feet of women; also that the dream warns him of a situation in which the hero is felled by the moon-shaped weapon. We read these situations as if they were real facts—as indeed they are, the “best possible expressions of a relatively unknown, highly potent power,” presented in the symbolic language of the psyche. Thus, his compulsion is seen not only as a deviation from normalcy, as we believe we know it, but also as a path, which the psyche attempts to show him, toward his own individual normalcy. The dream, therefore, does not distort or censor what we presume to know a...