C. G. Jung
Symbols of Transformation
Extracts from Part II, Vol. 5
N.B. unless otherwise stated by a ‘*’, all
use of ellipses, brackets, italics, etc. are
Jung’s.
Part II of Jung’s Symbols of Transformation
contains an account of the principal archetypal
components that he thinks are involved in the
process of transformation. The complete list is:
the libido and its transformation, the hero,
symbols of the mother and rebirth, the battle for
deliverance from the mother, the dual mother, and
the sacrifice. Taken together, this section runs
from page 121 to 444 in the Collected Works,
Volume 5, so the extracts given here are
necessarily much abbreviated, and only the first
three sections are treated here, but this should be
sufficient to support any application you want to
make of Jung to your assignment essay.
The Libido
This is a term and concept that Jung shares with Freud,
but while Freud uses the term to refer almost exclusively
to ‘sexual’ energy in its various manifestations, Jung’s
use of the term is much broader.
(p.129) … I use this term in the general sense in which it
was understood by the classical authors. Cicero gives it
a very wide meaning:
They hold that from two kinds of expected good arise desire and
delight, in the sense that delight is concerned with present good, and
desire with future good … since desire, being tempted and enflamed, is
carried away towards what seems good … For all men naturally pursue
those things that seem good and shun their opposites. Wherefore, as
soon as anything presents itself that seems good, nature herself impels
them to obtain it. If this is done with moderation and prudence, the
Stoics call it βούλησις, and we call it will. In their opinion this is found
only in the wise man, and they define it as follows: will is a rational
desire, but when it is divorced from reason and is too violently aroused,
that is ‘libido’, or unbridled desire, which is found in all fools.
(p. 130) Here libido means a ‘want’ or ‘wish’, and also, in
contradistinction to the ‘will’ of the stoics, ‘unbridled desire’.
… * It can also have the nuance of ‘lasciviousness’. St
Augustine aptly defines libido as a ‘general term for all
desire’ and says:
There is a lust for revenge, which is called rage; a lust for having money,
which is called avarice; a lust for victory at all costs, which is called
stubbornness; a lust for self-glorification, which is called boastfulness. There
are many and varied kinds of lust, some of which are specifically named,
others not. For who could easily give a name for a lust for domination, which,
as we know from the civil wars, is nevertheless very powerful in the minds of
tyrants?
For him libido denotes an appetite like hunger and thirst, and
so far as sexuality is concerned he says: ‘Pleasure is
preceded by an appetite that is felt in the flesh, a kind of
desire like hunger and thirst.’ …* We can say, then, that the
concept of libido has functionally the same significance as the
concept of energy in physics …*
(p. 139) The loss of reality function in schizophrenia
does not produce a heightening of sexuality: it produces
a world of fantasy with marked archaic features. (Here, Jung
refers to Sabina Spielrein – his patient, student, and then co-worker as
featured in the film, A Dangerous Method). …*
The fact that an
archaic world of fantasy takes the place of reality in
schizophrenia proves nothing about the nature of the
reality function as such; it only demonstrates the wellknown biological fact that whenever a more recent
system suffers deterioration it is likely to be replaced by
a more primitive and therefore obsolete one. To use
Freud’s simile, one begins firing with bows and arrows
instead of with guns. A loss of the latest acquisitions of
the reality function (or adaptation) must of necessity be
replaced, if at all, by an earlier mode of adaptation.
(He quotes Spielrein again: ‘I often had the illusion that the patients might
simply be victims of a deep-rooted folk superstition.’)
(p. 141) … the old superstitions were symbols that sought
to give adequate expression to the unknown in the world
(and in the psyche). The ‘conception’ (Auffassung) gives
us a ‘handle’ (Griff) by which to ‘grasp hold’ of things
(fassen, begreifen), and the resultant ‘concept’ (Begriff)
enables us to take possession of them. Functionally, the
concept belongs to the magically powerful name which
gets a grip on the object. This not only renders the
object harmless, but incorporates it into the psychic
system, thus increasing the meaning and power of the
human mind. Spielrein evidently thinks symbols have a
similar significance when she says:
Thus a symbol seems to me to owe its origin to the striving of a complex
for dissolution in the common totality of thought … The complex is thus
robbed of its personal quality … This tendency towards dissolution or
transformation of every individual complex is the mainspring of poetry,
painting, and every form of art.
The Origin of the Hero
(p. 171) The finest of all symbols of the libido is the
human figure, conceived as a demon or hero. Here the
symbolism leaves the objective, material realm or astral
and meteorological images and takes on a human form,
changing into a figure who passes from joy to sorrow,
from sorrow to joy, and, like the sun, now stands high at
the zenith and now is plunged into darkest night, only to
rise again in new splendour. Just as the sun, by its own
motion and in accordance with its own inner law, climbs
from morn to noon, crosses the meridian and goes its
downward way towards evening, leaving its radiance
behind it, and finally plunges into all-enveloping night, so
man sets his course by immutable laws and, his journey
over, sinks into darkness, to rise again in his children and
begin the cycle anew.
(p. 172) A certain willingness to give ear to these faint
nocturnal voices must be there, otherwise these subtle and
hardly perceptible inner experiences will pass unnoticed.
We can discern in this listening attitude an inward-flowing
current of libido, leading towards a still invisible and
mysterious goal. It is as if the libido had suddenly
discovered, in the depths of the unconscious, an object
which exercises a powerful attraction. As our life is
directed outwards and does not normally allow such
introversions, we have to suppose a rather exceptional
condition, for instance, a lack of external objects, which
forces the individual to seek a substitute in his own
psyche. It is hard to believe that this teeming world is too
poor to provide an object for human love – it offers
boundless opportunities to everyone. It is rather the
inability to love which robs a person of these
opportunities.
(p.172) The world is empty only to him who does not
know how to direct his libido towards things and people,
and to render them alive and beautiful. What compels us
to create a substitute from within ourselves is not an
external lack, but our own inability to include anything
outside ourselves in our love. Certainly the difficulties
and adversities of the struggle for existence may oppress
us, yet even the worst conditions need not hinder love;
on the contrary, they often spur us on to greater efforts.
Real difficulties alone will never drive the libido back to
the point where a neurosis arises, because the conflict
which is the precondition for every neurosis is lacking.
Only a resistance, which opposes its obstinate ‘won’t’ to
the ‘will’, is capable of producing a regression that may
become the starting point for a pathogenic disturbance.
Resistance to loving produces the inability to love, or else
that inability acts as a resistance.
(p. 172) Just as the libido may be compared to a
steady stream pouring its waters into the world of
reality, so a resistance, dynamically considered,
resembles, not a rock that juts up from the riverbed and causes the stream to flow round it, but a
flowing back towards the source. Part of the
psyche really wants the external object, but
another part of it strives back to the subjective
world, where the airy and lightly built palaces of
fantasy beckon.
(p. 175) We are thus forced to conclude that the
external object simply cannot be loved, because
an overwhelming proportion of the libido prefers
an internal object that rises up from the
unconscious as a substitute for the missing reality.
(p. 177) The essence of conscious processes is adaptation,
which takes place in a series of particulars. The
unconscious, on the other hand, is universal: it not only
binds individuals together into a nation or race, but unites
them with the men of the past and with their psychology.
Thus, by reason of its supra-individual universality, the
unconscious is the prime object of any real psychology
that claims to be more than psychophysics.
(p. 180) Repression, as we have seen, is not directed
solely against sexuality, but against the instincts in
general, which are the vital foundations, the laws
governing all life. The regression caused by repressing
the instincts always leads back to the psychic past, and
consequently to the phase of childhood where the decisive
factors appear to be, and sometimes actually are, the
parents. But the inborn instincts of the child play a
distinct role aside from the parents. …*
Jung argues that children have ‘individual determinants’
and then continues (p. 181) Yet to the empty
consciousness of the child, it must seem as if all the
determining influences come from outside, because
children cannot distinguish their own instincts from the
influence and will of their parents. This lack of
discrimination in the child makes it possible for the
animals which represent the instincts to appear at the
same time as attributes of the parents, and for the
parents to appear in animal form, the father as a bull, the
mother as a cow, and so on.
If the regression goes still further back, beyond the phase
of childhood to the preconscious, prenatal phase, then
archetypal images appear, no longer connected with the
individual’s memories, but belonging to the stock of
inherited possibilities of representation that are born
anew in every individual.
Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth
Assuming a level of regression back to childhood
memories, Jung continues: (p. 213) The symbol-creating
process substitutes for the mother the city, the well, the
cave, the Church, etc. This substitution is due to the fact
that the regression of libido reactivates the ways and
habits of childhood, and above all the relation to the
mother; but what was natural and useful to the child is a
psychic danger for the adult, and this is expressed in the
symbol of incest. Because the incest taboo opposes the
libido and blocks the path to regression, it is possible for
the libido to be canalized into the mother analogies thrown
up by the unconscious. In that way the libido becomes
progressive again, and even attains a level of
consciousness higher than before. The meaning and
purpose of this canalization are particularly evident when
the city appears in place of the mother:
(p. 213 cont.) the infantile attachment …* is a crippling
limitation for the adult, whereas attachment to the city
fosters his civic virtues and at least enables him to lead
a useful existence.
Jung then reviews a number of other ‘mother analogies’
and provides a long sequence of illustrations leading to
this in relation to water:
(p. 218) The maternal significance of water is one of
the clearest interpretations of symbols in the whole
field of mythology, so that even the ancient Greeks
could say that ‘the sea is the symbol of generation’.
From water comes life; hence of the two deities who
here interest us the most, Christ and Mithras, the latter
is represented as having been born beside a river,
while Christ experienced his ‘rebirth’ in the Jordan.
(p. 219) The projection of the mother-imago upon water
endows the latter with a number of numinous or magical
qualities peculiar to the mother. A good example of this
is the baptismal water symbolism in the Church. In
dreams and fantasies the sea or a large expanse of water
signifies the unconscious. The maternal aspect of water
coincides with the nature of the unconscious, because the
latter (particularly in men) can be regarded as the mother
or matrix of consciousness.
Jung then continues his review of these equivalent
symbols by writing about the wood, or tree of life: ‘The
tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruitbearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal
mother (shadows of this in Avatar?). And finally …
(p. 223) …* it must be pointed out that the basis of the
‘incestuous’ desire is not cohabitation, but as every sun
myth shows, the strange idea of becoming a child again, of
returning to the parental shelter, and of entering into the
mother in order to be reborn through her. But the way to
this goal lies through incest, i.e., the necessity of finding
some way into the mother’s body. One of the simplest
ways would be to impregnate the mother and beget oneself
in identical form all over again. But here the incest
prohibition intervenes; consequently the sun myths and
rebirth myths devise every conceivable kind of motheranalogy for the purpose of canalizing the libido into new
forms and effectively preventing it from regressing to
actual incest. For instance, the mother is transformed into
an animal, or is made young again, and then disappears
after giving birth, i.e., is changed back into her old shape.
It is not incestuous cohabitation that is desired, but rebirth.