How to Work with Symbols: Entering the Living Language of the Psyche

 The Symbolic Realm of the Psyche

As we descend into the unconscious we meet the symbolic realm of the psyche. This symbolic realm comes alive in our dreams at night but can also be intentionally activated through the creative process.

This symbolic realm appears to us as a combination of inner images representing figures, places and things and there’s a specific reason why our unconscious has chosen each of these different elements as symbols. The way you can think of it is that we all have within us an inbuilt symbolic dictionary from which the unconscious picks and chooses the most accurate elements to represent a specific thing. When we are born, this dictionary holds in it already information from the collective unconscious - information about our humanity that is universal to all of us. Then as we grow, this inner dictionary is constantly expanding and collecting into it personal meanings, so  it adds in it people, places and things from our personal experience and adds meaning from those experiences to the collective meanings. But this dictionary is largely encoded in our unconscious so we have to do some work to go back, and try to excavate these meanings, to understand the contents of this dictionary and why the unconscious chose that symbol through the many layers it contains. Many of the elements in our images and dreams are representations that express in the most efficient way the multitude and complexity of these different layers of meaning- these kind of representations can be thought of as symbols.

In this post I'll go more into symbols and especially how we can deepen into them through their layered meanings from a personal, cultural and collective context. By looking at the symbols from these different perspectives we can understand them from a wider viewpoint

Jung's View on Symbols

So lets look more into what symbols are from a Jungian viewpoint. A symbol is something that cannot be fully determined. If it can be fully determined and we know exactly what it means, then it's a sign, not a symbol.

So for example, if you see a cross on a map, you would know that it probably points to a church at that location. But if you see that same cross inside of a church, you would not be able to pin the meaning of it into any definitive thing, it can signify many different things to different people. Inside the church, it would be a symbol. Jung said that “a sign is always less than a thing that it point to and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight”.

This differentiation between a symbol and a sign is important for understanding the attitude or mindset that we have in our work with images and dreams. We should not decode the elements of our images and dreams thinking they are signs but that they are symbols. Jung said :  ‘Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiefly upon the attitude of the observing consciousness". To look at our dreams and images with a symbolic mindset is to look at them with the attitude of not knowing. 

So Jung regarded the symbol as the announcement of something unknown and that unknown holds within it a mystery. He said that “The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is “grasped.” That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets.”

Symbols in and of themselves are healing. They naturally give rise to what Jung termed the transcendant function and why working with them is so important. The symbol is a uniting agent in the psyche as Jung said: “It is a fact that symbols, by their very nature, can so unite the opposites, that these no longer diverge or clash but mutually supplement one another and give meaningful shape to life.”

The Three Layers of Symbols

Personal Level: 

The first thing to do when you start to dissect the different layers of symbols, is to think about their personal context. Looking at the personal associations we have to a symbol is important because we can then see how they are connected to our individual history.

I suggest to try this out for yourself - thinnk about what symbol has been meaningful for you in your dreams or if you have an ongoing creative practice with images, for example through art journaling, see what symbol there seems significant or reoccurring.

Once you've caught this symbol, write down memories, feelings and associations that you have to that symbol. These don’t have to be long and it’s actually better if you can stay to the point and focused especially in the feelings that are associated with this symbol. So for example I recently saw a dream that included stairs from my childhood home. I might write some feelings and memories of them:  this was specifically the stairway of my childhood home and generally this was a safe place to be in. I have good memories from the home and these are the stairs I am most familiar with, the stairsI have walked up and down the most in my life. I remember a few times when I had to wait in the stairs as a child to get home because I had forgotten my keys. And one time I fell in the stairs and got a bruise on my knee.

When you’re gathering personal associations you might think about how these associations relate to your current life and where in your life do you find this dynamic or energy that is related to the element coming up.

Cultural Level:

A more collective or cultural level of the symbols can be found by describing the symbol in a way that you attempt to define it.The way you can think about this, is that you can imagine an alien comes from space and the alien doesn't know anything about even the basic things on earth. How would you describe that thing to them - for example what is a certain object used for or what is the role of a person? So for my symbol of the stairs I might explain to the alien: Stair are used to travel up and down between different levels. They are usually divided into sections by landings that help us reach from one level to another. Here again think about the metaphoric meaning of this explanation you have given to the symbol and try to see where this kind of a dynamic is going on in your life.

Archetypal Level:

Finally we can Look into the archetypal level of symbols and this is a process that Jung termed amplification. Amplification is a method of association that finds similarities in mythology, religion, fairy tales and art. 

The process of amplification can be healing in itself. By looking at our inner symbols from first the personal then the cultural and collective and finally the archetypal we take a conscious process of connecting to something bigger than ourselves, to the transpersonal layers, we root ourselves to the numinous undercurrent of life. Jung said specifically that it is this connection with the numinous that heals. 

For example let me amplify for you the symbol of the stairs. The Mayans and Babylonians placed staircases in their temples and pyramids in order to bridge earth and heaven. The Egyptians on the other hand placed stairways in their pyramids to provide a transitional zone between life and death. In the Cinderella story, Cinderella runs down the grand staircase at midnight and leaves behind a glass slipper. The stairs in this story can be seen to represent a threshold between her magical self and everyday self. Stairs also relate to either ascent or descent. Archetypally, ascent can relate to striving toward consciousness while descent can signal a journey into the unconscious. The famous image of Dutch artist  Escher is a representation of stairs being simultaneously a way of going up and down.

For this part you can research the symbol online, you can also use AI to find associations. You might also use symbol dictionaries, which are different than dream dictionaries. Dream dictionaries will tell you in a kind of a definite way that if you dream of this then it means this thing so it treats the dream elements more as signs. But since we don't really want to do that, symbol dictionaries are better because they don't pin down the meaning of the symbol but they open it up by associating it into it’s archetypal roots. A symbol dictionary that I recommend is the Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. I think it's hands down the best symbol dictionary there is. It is made by the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism and they also have a website www.aras.org so that’s a great tool to use for researching symbols as well. 

Conclusion

You may not be able to do all of these three layers for all of your symbols. Some symbols will be more personal while some will be ones that you might feel that you have no personal associations to or that dont open up any differently through the explanations to the aliens and in that case archetypal amplification can help to bring insight.

Exploring a symbol through its personal, cultural, and archetypal layers allows us to engage with it in a living, dynamic way—one that respects its mystery rather than reducing it to a fixed meaning. By working with symbols in this way, we deepen our relationship with the unconscious and open a pathway for inner transformation, healing, and creative growth.

Image source: 

Relativity,  M. C. Escher, 1953

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