Symbols of Transformation

Symbols of Transformation is Jung's complete revision of Psychology of the Unconscious, first published in nineteen eleven and twelve, and the work in which he first stated his independent position. Its occasion is a set of fantasies, dream poems and a hypnagogic vision recorded by a young American woman whom Jung calls Miss Miller and whom he never treated. Jung reads that material by amplification, placing each image beside classical, oriental and Western parallels drawn from myth, religion and literature. He begins by distinguishing two kinds of thinking, the directed thinking of speech and science, and the undirected, associative, image-making thinking of dreams, children and myth. The central argument is that libido should be understood not as sexual energy in the narrow sense but as psychic energy in general, which can be transformed and channelled, and that symbols are the means of that transformation. Working through the symbolism of sun and fire, the origin of the hero, the mother and rebirth, the dual mother and sacrifice, Jung holds that such images arise from archetypes, understood as dispositions to produce similar ideas rather than as inherited ideas themselves. He reinterprets the incest prohibition as an impulse towards domestication, arguing that religion and myth organise instinctual force and make it available for higher purposes.

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• Carl Jung