Man uses the spoken or written word to express the meaning of what he wants to convey.
His language is full of symbols but he also often employs signs or images
that are not strictly descriptive.
Some are mere abbreviations or strings of initials such as UN, UNICEF, or UNESCO;
others are familiar trademarks, the names of patent medicines, badges, or insignia.
Although these are meaningless in themselves
they have acquired a recognizable meaning through common usage or deliberate intent.
Such things are not symbols.
They are signs, and they do no more than denote the objects to which they are attached.
What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life,
yet that possess specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning.
It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us.
Many Cretan monuments, for instance, are marked with the design of the double adze.
This is an object that we know, but we do not know its symbolic implications.
For another example, take the case of the Indian who, after a visit to England
told his friends at home that the English worship animals
because he had found eagles, lions, and oxen in old churches.
He was not aware (nor are many Christians)
that these animals are symbols of the Evangelists
and are derived from the vision of Ezekiel
and that this in turn has an analogy to the Egyptian sun god Horus and his four sons.
There are, moreover, such objects as the wheel and the cross
that are known all over the world yet that have
a symbolic significance under certain conditions.
Precisely what they symbolize is still a matter for controversial speculation.
Thus a word or an image is symbolic
when it implies something more than its obvious an immediate meaning.
It has a wider “unconscious” aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained.
Nor can one hope to define or explain it.
As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.
The wheel may lead our thoughts toward the concept of a “divine” sun
but at this point reason must admit its incompetence;
man is unable to define a “divine” being.
When, with all our intellectual limitations, we call something “divine”
we have merely given it a name, which may be based on a creed
but never on factual evidence.
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.
This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images.
But this conscious use of symbols is only one aspect of a psychological fact of great importance:
Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams.
It is not easy to grasp this point.
But the point must be grasped if we are to know more about the ways
in which the human mind works.
Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully
or comprehends anything completely.
He can see, hear, touch and taste
but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes
depend upon the number and quality of his senses.
These limit his perception of the world around him.
By using scientific instruments he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses.
For example, he can extend the range of his vision by binoculars
or of his hearing by electrical amplification.
But the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring distant or small objects
within range of his eyes or make faint sounds more audible.
No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty
beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.
There are, moreover, unconscious aspects of our perception of reality.
The first is the fact that even when our senses react to real phenomena,
sights and sounds,
they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the mind.
Within the mind, they become psychic events, whose ultimate nature is unknowable
(for the psyche cannot know its own psychical substance).
Thus every experience contains an indefinite number of unknown factors
not to speak of the fact that every concrete object is always unknown in certain respects
because we cannot know the ultimate nature of matter itself.
Then there are certain events of which we have not consciously taken note;
they have remained, so to speak, below the threshold of consciousness.
They have happened, but they have been absorbed subliminally
without our conscious knowledge.
We can become aware of such happenings only in a moment of intuition
or by a process of profound thought that leads to a later realization
that they must have happened;
and though we may have originally ignored their emotional and vital importance
it later wells up from the unconscious as a sort of afterthought.
It may appear, for instance, in the form of a dream.
As a general rule, the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams
where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image.
As a matter of history, it was the study of dreams that first enabled psychologists
to investigate the unconscious aspect of conscious psychic events.
It is on such evidence that psychologists assume the existence of an unconscious psyche
though many scientists and philosophers deny its existence.
They argue naively that such an assumption implies the existence of two “subjects”
or (to put it in a common phrase)
two personalities within the same individual.
But this is exactly what it does imply –quite correctly.
And it is one of the curses of modern man
that many people suffer from this divided personality.
It is by no means a pathological symptom;
it is a normal fact that can be observed at any time and everywhere.
It is not merely the neurotic whose right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.
This predicament is a symptom of a general unconsciousness
that is the undeniable common inheritance of all mankind.
Man has developed consciousness slowly and laboriously
in a process that took untold ages to reach the civilized state
which is arbitrarily dated from the invention of script in about 4000 B.C.
And this evolution is far from complete
for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness.
What we call the “psyche” is by no means identical with our consciousness and its contents.
Whoever denies the existence of the unconscious is in fact assuming
that our present knowledge of the psyche is total.
And this belief is clearly just as false as the assumption
that we know all there is to be known about the natural universe.
Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless.
Thus we cannot define either the psyche or nature.
We can merely state what we believe them to be and describe, as best we can, how they function.
Quite apart, therefore, from the evidence that medical research has accumulated
there are strong grounds of logic for rejecting statements like “There is no unconscious.”
Those who say such things merely express an age-old “misoneism”
a fear of the new and the unknown.
There are historical reasons for this resistance to the idea of an unknown part of the human psyche.
Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature
and it is still in an “experimental” state.
It is frail, menaced by specific dangers, and easily injured.
As anthropologists, have noted,
one of the most common mental derangements that occur among primitive people
is what they call “the loss of a soul”
which means, as the name indicates, a noticeable disruption
(or, more technically, a dissociation) of consciousness.
Among such people, whose consciousness is at a different level of development from ours
the “soul” (or psyche) is not felt to be a unit.
Many primitives assume that a man has a “bush soul” as well as his own
and that this bush soul is incarnate in a wild animal or a tree
with which the human individual has some kind of psychic identity.
This is what the distinguished French ethnologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl called
a “mystical participation.”
He later retracted this term under pressure of adverse criticism
but I believe that his critics were wrong.
It is a well-known psychological fact that an individual may have such an unconscious identity
with some other person or object.
This identity takes a variety of forms among primitives.
If the bush soul is that of an animal, the animal itself is considered
as some sort of brother to the man.
A man whose brother is a crocodile, for instance, is supposed to be safe
when swimming a crocodile-infested river.
If the bush soul is a tree
the tree is presumed to have something like parental authority over the individual concerned.
In both cases an injury to the bush soul is interpreted as an injury to the man.
In some tribes, it is assumed that a man has a number of souls;
this belief expresses the feeling of some primitive individuals
that they each consist of several linked but distinct units.
This means that the individual’s psyche is far from being safely synthesized;
on the contrary, it threatens to fragment only too easily
under the onslaught of unchecked emotions.
While this situation is familiar to us from the studies of anthropologists
it is not so irrelevant to our own advanced civilization as it might seem.
We too can become dissociated and lose our identity.
We can be possessed and altered by moods,
or become unreasonable and unable to recall important facts about ourselves or others,
so that people ask: “What the devil has got into you?”
We talk about being able to control ourselves but self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue.
We may think we have ourselves under control;
yet a friend can easily tell us things about ourselves of which we have no knowledge.
Beyond doubt, even in what we call a high level of civilization
human consciousness has not yet achieved a reasonable degree of continuity.
It is still vulnerable and liable to fragmentation.
This capacity to isolate part of one’s mind, indeed, is a valuable characteristic.
It enables us to concentrate upon one thing at a time
excluding everything else that may claim our attention.
But there is a world of difference between a conscious decision to split off
and temporarily suppress a part of one’s psyche
and a condition in which this happens spontaneously, without one’s knowledge or consent
and even against one’s intention.
The former is a civilized achievement
the latter a primitive “loss of a soul,” or even the pathological cause of a neurosis.
Thus, even in our day the unity of consciousness is still a doubtful affair;
it can too easily be disrupted.
An ability to control one’s emotions that may be very desirable from one point of view
would be a questionable accomplishment from another
for it would deprive social intercourse of variety, color, and warmth.
It is against this background that we must review the importance of dreams
those flimsy, evasive, unreliable, vague, and uncertain fantasies.
To explain my point of view, I should like to describe how it developed over a period of years,
and how I was led to conclude that dreams are the most frequent and universally accessible source
for the investigation of man’s symbolizing faculty.
