Symbol Watcher

The search for meaning in cultural, artistic and dream imagery

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What’s A Symbol?

 

If I’m fortunate enough to have you as a frequent reader, you’ll find that I turn to the writings of psychologist Carl Jung and the Jungian community of psychoanalysts for much of my understanding of symbols. Jung spent most of his life studying not only the meanings of individual symbolic images, but how symbolism functions as a form of communication in the human psyche, providing significance and meaning to our lives.

 

In Man and His Symbols, Jung’s last work — and the only one written specifically for the general public –Jung gives the following definition of a symbol:

“A word or image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained.  . . .  As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason. . . . Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend.”
 
Symbols possess two basic layers of meaning:
  • Personal — the implications of the symbol are defined by the individual person’s relationship to that symbol. The relation can be defined by the person’s sex, age, ethnicity, level of education, previous experience, etc. For instance, if I dream a black cat is walking beside me, I might interpret that cat to be a symbol of witchcraft or bad luck, if that is what I believed. But, if I had a favorite pet that was a black cat and that cat was at once both independent and loyal to me, my interpretation of that black cat symbol would be very different.
  • Collective — the implications of the symbol are outside the realm of what we know consciously. The symbol intrigues us, even stirs deep emotions, but we don’t know why. Only through research and, what Jungians call “amplification” do we find that a symbol we have come in contact with belongs to a deeper, more universal layer of human experience. The image sprouts from an unconscious knowing that we carry deep within our DNA, if you will, because of the experiences of the generations and generations who have walked before us.

For instance, several years ago I had this dream:

I was in the bedroom I had as a teenager. On my little gold and white desk, next to my ballerina music box, stood a skull, glowing with fire inside it. The skull terrified me. As I tried to knock it off my desk I woke up screaming.

I had already been working with my dreams for a couple years at the time I dreamed this. I thought about that fiery skull for a long while, but I couldn’t come up with any personal associations or experiences for such a thing. It was only when I amplified the image — I researched the historic and mythic stories associated with a fiery skull — that I discovered the image is a symbol of mature knowing and discrimination. It represents the ability to see the things in ourselves and in others that we might not want to see, the things that are not pretty and innocent.

I found this meaning in a very old Russian folktale called “Vasalisa.” Vasalisa is a young girl who must leave home and complete a series of arduous tasks. To help her find her way back home and reclaim her life from those who had mistreated her, the Baba Yaga, gives her a fiery skull on a stick. Understanding the meaning of that collective symbol was crucial to my understanding of what the dream was telling my about the period of my life I was about to enter.

Here are two great reference books I use as a starting point when I’m trying to understand a symbol’s possible meanings:

–Writeye