Man and his Symbols

Author: Carl Jung

Publisher: Picador / 1964

Pages: 413

This book, the last to be written by Jung before his death in 1961, provides a unique opportunity to assess his contribution to the life and thought of the last century for it was also his first attempt to present his life-work in psychology to a non-technical public.

What emerges with great clarity from this book is that Jung has done immense service both to psychology as a science and to our general understanding of man in society, by insisting that imaginative life must be taken seriously in its own right, as the most distinctive characteristic of human beings.

The book owes its existence to one of Jung's own dreams. He dreamt that his work was understood by a wide public, rather than just by psychiatrists.

Here he examines the full world of the unconscious, whose language he believed to be the symbols constantly revealed in dreams.

Convinced that dreams offer practical advice, sent from the unconscious to the conscious self, Jung felt that self-understanding would lead to a full and productive life.

One day in 1959 the BBC carried a long interview with Jung at his lakeside home in Zurich. One man who saw this interview was Wolfgang Foges, managing director of Aldus Books. When he was a child, Foges and his family lived near the Freuds in Vienna.

Watching Jung talking about his life and work, Foges reflected what a pity it was that, while the general outline of Freud's work was well known to educated readers all over the world, Jung had never managed to break through to the general public and was always considered too difficult for popular reading.

It was Jung himself who chose those who were to contribute to the book, after his own inaugural chapter.

Dr Marie-Louise von Franz, of Zurich, was perhaps his closest professional confidante and friend. She describes the process by which the conscious and the unconscious within an individual learn to know, respect and accommodate one another.

Dr Joseph L. Henderson, of San Francisco, was one of the most prominent and trusted of American Jungians. He illustrates the appearance of several archetypal patterns in ancient mythology, folk legend and primitive ritual.

Aniela Jaffe, of Zurich, who in addition to being an experienced analyst, was Jung's confidential private secretary and his biographer, demonstrates man's recurring interest in the symbols of the unconscious, especially in the visual arts.

And Dr Jolande Jacobi, the most experienced author among Jung's Zurich circle, gives us a Jungian analysis, inevitably compressed, of a man, Henry, and his sometimes lurid dreams.

Two final points. To Jungians the dream is not a kind of standardised cryptogram that can be decoded by a glossary of symbol meanings; it is an integral, important and personal expression of the individual unconscious which is communicating with the dreamer alone and is selecting symbols for its purpose that have meaning to the dreamer and to nobody else.

Secondly, those who have limited themselves to living entirely in the world of the conscious and who reject communication with the unconscious bind themselves by the laws of conscious, formal life. Jung and his colleagues reject the limitations of this method of argument. His arguments spiral upward over the subject like a bird circling a tree. At first, near the ground, it sees only a confusion of leaves and branches. Gradually, as it circles higher and higher, the recurring aspects of the tree form a wholeness and relate to their surroundings.