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A review by athousandgreatbooks
Man and His Symbols by C.G. Jung
5.0
Summoned or not, the God will come
Man and His Symbols is Carl Jung’s last work, completed days before his death. It is the most accessible of all his works (so I’ve heard) which owes its existence to one of Jung’s dreams. Jung dreamt that his work was understood by the common man, not just psychologists, and agreed to distil the wealth of his psychoanalytic thought that has colored modern psychology for the masses.
Commonplace psychological terms such as extraversion, introversion, archetypes, synchronicity, and the like owe their parlance to Jung’s lifelong work into the unconscious. What began with Freud’s dogmatic approach to the unconscious contents of the psyche went on to become what is now considered as Depth Psychology.
Take your dreams seriously!
The use of symbols by the conscious mind seeks to convey meaning rationally, logically. But man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams. Rational and scientific thinking can only take one so far in understanding the self. One has to carefully straddle the boundaries of empirical evidence and subjective truths and carefully analyze dreams and their symbolic riches to ‘communicate’ with the unconscious. There is no hard and fast rule with dream interpretation, for every individual has his/her own unique symbolism.
At the same time, there are certain symbols, special motifs (read Archetypes) that predate civilization. These charged pagan rituals, orthodox religiosity, spiritual experiences, and continue to govern us (and will always do). These have their own language for their source is the unconscious out of which our conscious minds emerged.
Instead of disregarding the unconscious as the bin where all our mental refuse ends up, we should update our common perceptions and become aware of the fact that the unconscious contents govern us day in, day out, more than we care to acknowledge. These contents have a numinous nature, and only by becoming aware of them (through studies in mythologies, dreams, and fantasy) can we hope to individuate.
Man and His Symbols is Carl Jung’s last work, completed days before his death. It is the most accessible of all his works (so I’ve heard) which owes its existence to one of Jung’s dreams. Jung dreamt that his work was understood by the common man, not just psychologists, and agreed to distil the wealth of his psychoanalytic thought that has colored modern psychology for the masses.
Commonplace psychological terms such as extraversion, introversion, archetypes, synchronicity, and the like owe their parlance to Jung’s lifelong work into the unconscious. What began with Freud’s dogmatic approach to the unconscious contents of the psyche went on to become what is now considered as Depth Psychology.
Take your dreams seriously!
The use of symbols by the conscious mind seeks to convey meaning rationally, logically. But man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams. Rational and scientific thinking can only take one so far in understanding the self. One has to carefully straddle the boundaries of empirical evidence and subjective truths and carefully analyze dreams and their symbolic riches to ‘communicate’ with the unconscious. There is no hard and fast rule with dream interpretation, for every individual has his/her own unique symbolism.
At the same time, there are certain symbols, special motifs (read Archetypes) that predate civilization. These charged pagan rituals, orthodox religiosity, spiritual experiences, and continue to govern us (and will always do). These have their own language for their source is the unconscious out of which our conscious minds emerged.
Instead of disregarding the unconscious as the bin where all our mental refuse ends up, we should update our common perceptions and become aware of the fact that the unconscious contents govern us day in, day out, more than we care to acknowledge. These contents have a numinous nature, and only by becoming aware of them (through studies in mythologies, dreams, and fantasy) can we hope to individuate.