Symbol

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Notes

Carl Jung

According to Jung, a symbol is...

"What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific con notations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us....a word or an image is symbolic where it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning."[1][2]

"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."[3]comprehend

What sorts of things are beyond human understanding?

  • many aspects of the natural world
  • psychic events ("for the psyche cannot know its own psychical substance") [4]
  • Unconscious events of which we have "not consciously taken note" and have therefore been "absorbed subliminally"[5]

Footnotes

  1. Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Anchor Press Double Day, 1964. p. 20.
  2. Seems like a dumb definition to me. "It's a symbol if we can't figure it out.."
  3. Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Anchor Press Double Day, 1964. p. 21.
  4. Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Anchor Press Double Day, 1964. p. 23.
  5. Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Anchor Press Double Day, 1964. p. 23.












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