Quotes About Symbolism

Before the beginning of this century, Freud and Josef Breuer had recognized that neurotic symptoms—hysteria, certain types of pain, and abnormal behavior—are in fact symbolically meaningful. They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself, just as it may in dreams; and they are equally symbolic.

This fact, as I shall later explain, has a direct and important bearing upon the interpretation of dreams. It is obvious that if you assume the dream to be symbolic, you will interpret it differently from a person who believes that the essential energizing thought or emotion is known already and is merely "disguised" by the dream. In the latter case, dream interpretation makes little sense, for you find only what you already know.

I can confirm by a modern dream the element of prognosis (or precognition) that can be found in an old dream quoted by Artemidorus of Daldis, in the second century A.D.: A man dreamed that he saw his father die in the flames of a house on fire. Not long afterward, he himself died in a phlegmone (fire, or high fever), which I presume was pneumonia.

Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.

We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we wonder about them, but that is all. We do not take the trouble to understand them, let alone draw ethical conclusions from them. This stopping-short conjures up the negative effects of the unconscious.

The tomb in which our king is buried is called . . . Saturn"*

The figure of the Trickster] is the collective shadow.

I found sometimes, that it is of great help in handling such a case, to encourage them, to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their "mythology.

The hero who clings to the mother is the dragon, and when the hero is reborn from the mother he becomes the conqueror of the dragon.

I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world—and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.

The really dangerous people are not the great heretics and unbelievers, but the swarm of petty thinkers, the rationalizing intellectuals, who suddenly discover how irrational all religious dogmas are. Anything not understood is given short shrift, and the highest values of symbolic truth are irretrievably lost. What can a rationalist do with the dogma of the virgin birth, or with Christ's sacrificial death, or the Trinity?

One of the countless symbolic or allegorical images of the sexual act is a deer hunt: A detail from a painting by the 16th-century German artist Cranach. The sexual implication of the deer hunt is underlined by a medieval English folk song called "The Keeper": The first doe that he shot at he missed, And the second doe he trimmed he kissed, And the third ran away in a young man's heart, She's amongst the leaves of the green O.

visul este o autoprezentare spontan?, într-o form? de exprimare simbolic?, a situaÅ£iei actuale a inconÅŸtientului.

The Song of Hiawatha contains material that is well suited to bring into play the vast potentialities for archetypal symbolization latent in the human mind and to stimulate the creation of images. But the products always contain the same old human problems, which rise up again and again in new symbolic guise from the shadowy world of the unconscious.

Numbers thus appear to be a tangible connection between the spheres of matter and psyche

To put it in modern psychological language, this projection of the hieros gamos signifies the conjunction of conscious and unconscious, the transcendent function characteristic of the individuation process. Integration of the unconscious invariably has a healing effect.

I myself recently dreamed that a UFO came speeding towards me which turned out to be the lens of a magic lantern whose projected image was myself; this suggested to me that I was the figure, himself deep in meditation, who is produced by a meditating yogi.

This choice of symbol, too, is not arbitrary, but is documented by alchemical literature from the first to the eighteenth century. The lapis is produced, as we have already seen, from the splitting and putting together of the four elements, from the rotundum. The rotundum is a highly abstract, transcendent idea, which by reason of its roundness76 and wholeness refers to the Original Man, the Anthropos.

Myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul.

The Lingam is certainly not an obscene allusion; nor is the cross merely a sign of death. Much depends upon the maturity of the dreamer who produces such an image.

A symbol does not disguise, it reveals in time.

In reality fantasies mean much more than that, for they represent at the same time the other mechanism—of repressed extraversion in the introvert, and of repressed introversion in the extravert.

The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.

Dreams, visions, fantasies, and delusions are expressive of a situation.