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 well-known 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 river-bed 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 fruit-bearing 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 mother-analogy 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.