The symbol is a Living Body
The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious
The symbol is a living body, corpus et anima; hence the “child” is such an apt formula for the symbol.
The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality; it can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness.
The deeper “layers” of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. “Lower down,” that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence “at bottom” the psyche is simply “world.”
In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking.
The more archaic and “deeper,” that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more “material” it is.
The more abstract, differentiated, and specified it is, and the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its universal character.
Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of attempts at rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Page 291.
Carl Jung: the relativity of the symbol.
Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6)
We now come to the main theme of this chapter—the relativity of the symbol.
The “relativity of God,” as I understand it, denotes a point of view that does not conceive of God as “absolute,” i.e., wholly “cut off” from man and existing outside and beyond all human conditions, but as in a certain sense dependent on him; it also implies a reciprocal and essential relation between man and God, whereby man can be understood as a function of God, and God as a psychological function of man.
From the empirical standpoint of analytical psychology, the God-image is the symbolic expression of a particular psychic state, or function, which is characterized by its absolute ascendency over the will of the subject, and can therefore bring about or enforce actions and achievements that could never be done by conscious effort.
This overpowering impetus to action (so far as the God-function manifests itself in acts), or this inspiration that transcends conscious understanding, has its source in an accumulation of energy in the unconscious.
The accumulated libido activates images lying dormant in the collective unconscious, among them the God-image, that engram or imprint which from the beginning of time has been the collective expression of the most overwhelmingly powerful influences exerted on the conscious mind by unconscious concentrations of libido. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 412
Carl Jung: the relativity of the symbol.
Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6)
We now come to the main theme of this chapter—the relativity of the symbol.
The “relativity of God,” as I understand it, denotes a point of view that does not conceive of God as “absolute,” i.e., wholly “cut off” from man and existing outside and beyond all human conditions, but as in a certain sense dependent on him; it also implies a reciprocal and essential relation between man and God, whereby man can be understood as a function of God, and God as a psychological function of man.
From the empirical standpoint of analytical psychology, the God-image is the symbolic expression of a particular psychic state, or function, which is characterized by its absolute ascendency over the will of the subject, and can therefore bring about or enforce actions and achievements that could never be done by conscious effort.
This overpowering impetus to action (so far as the God-function manifests itself in acts), or this inspiration that transcends conscious understanding, has its source in an accumulation of energy in the unconscious.
The accumulated libido activates images lying dormant in the collective unconscious, among them the God-image, that engram or imprint which from the beginning of time has been the collective expression of the most overwhelmingly powerful influences exerted on the conscious mind by unconscious concentrations of libido. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 412
The Symbol of the Crystal.
The symbol of the crystal signifies the unalterable law of events that comes of itself In this seed you grasp what is to come. I saw something terrible and incomprehensible. (It was on the night of Christmas day of the year 1913.)
I saw the peasant’s boot, the sign of the horrors of the peasant war, of murdering incendiaries and of bloody cruelty: I knew to interpret this sign for myself as nothing but the fact that something bloody and dreadful lay before us. I saw the foot of a giant that crushed a whole city: How could I interpret this sign otherwise?
I saw that the way to self-sacrifice began here. They will all become terribly enraptured by these tremendous experiences, and in their blindness will want to understand them as outer events. It is an inner happening; that is the way to the perfection of the mystery of Christ, so that the peoples learn self-sacrifice. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 254
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog