Getting Lost in Jung - My Slow Read of Chapter One – Part 1

I’ve been studying Chapter 1 "Approaching the Unconscious” in Man and His Symbols for a while, and I confess that I got stuck because I felt that I wasn’t absorbing it. A way to address this issue was to put it all together and share it. However, I am breaking this down into two parts. Here I bring Part 1 of the discussion.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. 

The title, Man and His Symbols, sounds quite intriguing. Just by analysing the title, I am guessing that Jung will talk about a relationship between mankind and symbols. The question I’d immediately raise is: “What are the symbols that he is talking about? Why do symbols matter?” Simply by reading the title, I can feel the urge to understand these points and am glad that Jung covered them almost immediately in Chapter 1.

Approaching the Unconscious, Chapter 1 – A Brief Overview

Jung opens by distinguishing a sign from a symbol and showing how symbols arise from dreams. He then builds a case for taking the unconscious seriously, arguing that its contents are vaster than those of waking consciousness. However, mainstream science overlooked its importance until Freud paved the way. Freud's view on dreams, though, is quite different from Jung's: Freud's method of free association tends to move away from the dream's own imagery in search of a hidden meaning beneath it. Jung claims that understanding this meaning requires a full study of the psyche (which he did!). Because the dream's own workings are not easy to grasp, it is part of our nature to reject whatever looks chaotic or unfamiliar. This is something that happens not only in science, but, interestingly, it can happen within indigenous spiritually driven communities. Throughout Jung’s anthropological studies in East African communities, Jung observed that only the chief’s dreams were considered, since the regular members thought that their dreams were nonsense. Regardless of cultural background, modern man has lost his relationship with the subjective world of the symbols.

“Modern man does not understand how much his rationalism (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the ‘mercy” of his psychic “underworld”. He has freed himself from “superstitions” but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.” — C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Chapter 1: "Approaching the Unconscious"

Sign vs Symbol

A sign just stands for something known (like a stop sign). A symbol points to something that can't be fully explained by itself or grasped consciously as it implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us. The point is that humans are constantly producing symbols, often without meaning to, because part of our mind is always reaching for things beyond what we consciously understand. This is where the iceberg model becomes useful.

Consciousness sits on the surface and deals with more tangible realities. The symbolic world, on the other hand, lives in deeper layers of the psyche that go beyond consciousness. Those depths are where we're least likely to find familiar life, and if anything lives there at all, it's stranger and intangible. The deeper layers of the iceberg, immersed in water, represent the personal unconscious proposed by Sigmund Freud. Jung, however, proposes an even deeper layer called the Collective Unconscious (the archetypal layer), arguing that the unconscious isn't just repressed material, which is one of Jung's key divergences from the Freudian view. Seen this way, the psyche is represented by the whole iceberg, where the symbolic world occupies a vast portion of it.

The symbolic world is fully present in our psyche. We are influenced by the symbolic meanings that people and things hold for us. Think about archetypes in myths and fairy tales. Although they may not be explicitly present, their symbolic meanings appear in movies, fiction, and especially in marketing campaigns. In addition, symbolic meanings are applied to our daily lives to establish the value we assign to things. For example, have you noticed that car brands today rarely talk about how robust their engines are in their advertising? Instead, a car may be presented as a symbol of freedom, family, success, power or adventure. In this way, the car becomes more than a means of transportation. It can become associated with an image of who we are, who we want to be, or how we want others to see us.

People who collect miniatures, antiques, or objects associated with fictional worlds such as Star Wars provide another interesting example. The symbolic meaning attached to a character or object can become a major part of its value. A small figurine may be made of relatively inexpensive materials, yet collectors may be willing to pay a significant amount for it because of what the character represents to them. The material object becomes a carrier of symbolic meaning, and that meaning can drive its emotional and financial value. In this sense, we are not necessarily valuing the object for what it physically is, but for what it represents psychologically. The character may embody qualities such as the Hero, the Shadow, the Wise Old Man, or the Rebel, allowing the object to connect the individual with a much larger symbolic world. For example, with Star Wars, Darth Vader can evoke the Shadow, while Luke Skywalker can be associated with the Hero's journey. The collector may not consciously think, “I am purchasing an archetypal representation of the Shadow.” The symbolic association comes from the unconscious layers.

For this reason, Jung argues that consciousness has a narrow "field of vision." It is not aware of everything around us and can dismiss details at any given moment.

The Unconscious Is Bigger Than We Think

We tend to register perceptions without noticing them. Memories and emotional reactions that we didn't consciously process are also part of the psyche.

“Man has developed consciousness slowly and laboriously, in a process that took untold ages to reach the civilised state around 4000 B.C. based on the invention of script.” …. “What we call the psyche is by no means identical with our consciousness and its contents”. — C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Chapter 1: "Approaching the Unconscious"

The unconscious symbolic language can emerge in an awake state or in dreams. An example of communication in an awake state, Jung brings the story of a man who was walking with a friend around a farm:

A man was walking and chatting with a friend when, all of a sudden, he had a vivid memory of his childhood. He got intrigued since he was no longer talking about his childhood, and he couldn’t understand how that particular thought emerged. Then, he decided to go back to the spot in their path where the memory arose. What he observed was a particular animal smell that had been present during his childhood. So, the unconscious had stored the memory of that smell, but the conscious mind was not aware of it. The symbol of his childhood was hidden in a smell. So how many times are we triggered and don’t know what has provoked us? Symbols are hidden everywhere.

Freud and Jung: What Is a Dream Telling Us?

Hidden symbols were the core of Freud’s method of free association to communicate with the unconscious. In his method, the person will talk about a dream and be asked about associations related to the elements in the dream. Let’s say you dream of a cat fighting with a dog. Freud wouldn’t be interested to know how the fight was or whether it was night or day. Instead, he would be more interested to know what the cat and dog are associated with in your life. So, you might answer: “The cat makes me think about betrayal”; “then betrayal reminds me of a childhood friend”; “this childhood friend reminds me of when I was 7 years old and of a time when my mother yelled at me” … Here, the symbolic meaning itself is lost and lands in a complex. For Freud, the dream alone does not have an intelligence or function as an entity such as “the dream maker” that is telling a story that needs to be interpreted. This is exactly the point where Jung disagrees with Freud.

Jung began to question the use of free association as a way of uncovering complexes through dreams after a colleague told him about an experience during a long train journey through Russia. Unable to read the Cyrillic script on the railway signs, his colleague began freely associating with the unfamiliar letters and eventually found himself recalling unpleasant childhood memories. This gave Jung an important insight: a dream was not actually necessary for free association to lead someone to a complex. If almost any starting point could produce a chain of associations, then perhaps the dream itself had a particular meaning and function that deserved attention. By following associations too far away from the dream, its own symbolic message could easily be lost.

Now, finding a logical narrative in dreams can be difficult. The fact that Jung recognises that dreams are not easy to grasp is a relief for those who are willing to learn about dream interpretation. Imagine that Jung worked on approximately 80,000 dreams during his career*. This is equivalent to the analysis of 5 dreams per day for 45 years. Dreams were central to his technique, so every session (around 5-8/day) he would start with a dream. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung mentions his own method, which involved adopting a mindset after listening to a dream: “I have no clue what this dream is about.” This way he could calm the ego, knowing beforehand its low tolerance for chaotic information.

A Few Thoughts Before Part 2

After working through this chapter, I think I am beginning to understand why I initially found it so difficult. Jung is asking us to consider a part of the psyche that does not communicate in the same rational language as consciousness. Symbols, dreams and unexpected associations may point towards something we cannot immediately understand. Perhaps the challenge is not to find an immediate explanation, but to become comfortable with not knowing and allow the unconscious to show us what we might otherwise overlook.


In the next post, I will explore Why We Reject What We Do Not Understand and Modern Man and the Loss of the Symbolic World.



*von Franz, M.-L. (1964). The process of individuation. In C. G. Jung & M.-L. von Franz, Man and His Symbols (pp. 158–229). Aldus Books.