AN INQUIRY INTO IMAGE
These matters that with myself I Too much discuss
Too much explain
—T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Symbol and Image. When I am asked, as it often happens in the discussion following a lecture, “Why don’t you speak of symbols?,” “What’s the difference between an image, an archetypal image, and a symbol?,” I usually reply with a confession: I come from Zurich; for the past quarter century I have lived in a world of symbols. They no longer hold my attention. Everyone in Zurich speaks of symbols, looks them up, writes theses on them: the swan, the cave, the arrow, the number five, light-and-dark, the wounded heel, calf, knee, thigh, hip … These are symbols, and I, too, have worked on them. This is because it is said by the Zurich school that one cannot understand psychic materials, dreams especially, without a knowledge of symbols. Or, in the words of the Master, to do justice to a dream one must:
adapt a combined technique, which on the one hand rests on the dreamer’s associations and on the other hand fills the gaps from the interpreter’s knowledge of symbols.
(This statement, by the way, is from the Interpretation of Dreams, p. 353, by Sigmund Freud.)
But are these symbols (swan, arrow, cave, five), images? No; we shall say they are not images, and by this assert a clear distinction at the start between symbol and image. However, we shall also propose that symbols become images when they are particularized by a specific context, mood, and scene, that is, when they are precisely qualified. This is our rule of thumb to bear in mind as we proceed. Let’s see how it works.
A dream:
In some kind of a cave, a dark cavern. The whole place slopes backwards and downwards from where I’m standing. There was a big dead white swan with arrows sticking out of its breast at all angles. I think there were five of them. I felt I could not breathe in there and turned desperately around toward daylight—brilliant—hurrying out without looking back. But in my hurry I seem to lose control of my leg, the right one, I guess at the knee, and my leg wobbled in all directions as I hurried.
In this dream, the arrow, cave, swan, five, knee, etc., are the symbols. I can look them up in a dictionary of symbols or in an index to Jung. This research is the first step of “amplification.” By finding more about these words than my own personal associations (I hurt my knee when I was about three years old; arrows mean to me St. Sebastian; I was always told swans are beautiful but dangerous), I am gaining a wider cultural context, something about how these symbols appear to the imagination in general through the history of art, religion, and folklore.
So I shall find that caves are places of refuge, where mysteries occur, where gods are born or children kept, where secrets, treasures, and cries are hidden, and that they are often imagined as entrances to an underworld. And I may discover that swans are birds of high inspirational gods: Eros, Aphrodite Urania, and Apollo. They have to do with love and with death in mythologies, with longing and long-distance flights; also these white waterbirds belong among the anima phenomenology of tall-necked princesses and water nymphs and maidens, and especially with curious combinations of ugliness with beauty, of water with air, of proud savagery with extreme softness. And so on about arrows, fives, knees, breasts, brightness, etc.
The field of this sort of knowledge is symbology: the study of symbols. The conscious use of swan and arrow, cave and knee, in a poem, painting or ballet is symbolism. (Conscious use here means employing them for emotional and aesthetic effects, especially those that enlarge an event toward universality. Another kind of conscious use is employing symbols to convey a definite meaning that is transparently disguised in the symbols, i.e., allegory.) One who uses symbols and schools that urge using them in this manner are called symbolist. Symbolists can create haunting impressions by the use of traditional cultural figures, or by juxtaposing them in interesting ways, or by suggestively altering their usual form. Symbols, per se, are neither good nor bad, and symbolic works can range from majesty to kitsch. Symbolization as a spontaneous psychological act generally refers to a curious bunching of significance into compressed form, whether the form be a sensuous image, a concrete object, or an abstract formula. Symbolization takes place nightly in our dreams and daily in our speech. It is such a basic activity that it is as incomprehensible as consciousness itself and, in this basic general sense, not subject to our inquiry. So when I speak about symbolizing, I mean more specifically seeing images symbolically or turning images into symbols.—A very great deal has been written about what I have just put in this paragraph, but our paragraph will serve for a preliminary orientation.
A symbol holds at least one main idea in an image—the cave holds the idea, e.g., of mystery, and presents it in sensuous form. (However, a symbol also holds an image in and by and to its main idea—a troubling consequent we shall return to later.) Both image and idea have in common something general in human experience that is durable through time. That is, a symbol condenses a set of conventions that tend toward universality. Wherever and whenever cave, swan, arrow appear, they tend to bunch a closely similar cluster of ideas. This very conventionality is a clue to the recognition of symbols. It is also what accounts for the majesty of their kitsch. For symbols bring the depth and power of history and culture, the generally human experiences of the universe, which are both ineffable truths and banalities. A swan is a good example of this. It can be immensely forceful or utterly trite, depending on—well, what? Depending, first of all, on how the swan appears, the image.
Consequently, two ways now open up. We can approach images via symbols, or symbols via images. If we focus on the whenever and wherever of an image, its generality and conventionality, we are looking at it symbolically. If, on the other hand, we examine the how of a symbol, its particularity and peculiarness, then we are looking at it imagistically.
Therapy usually approaches images through symbols, and there are distinct advantages to this method. Since the disadvantages shall frequently engage us in the following pages, let’s first review the advantages.
First, when confronted with a dream and in search of its meaning, we fill in the gaps of our personal associations with our knowledge of symbols, just as Freud said. We learn this symbolic approach during analytical training. The approach is also a necessary consequent of Jung’s emphasis upon the manifest dream: if a lion appears, it is a lion and not a tiger or a bear. Since the dream has been specific, we must be equally so if we wish to approximate its meaning with our interpretation. We must know how lions differ from tigers and bears so that we are to the point and less waffling about the dream lion as “animality,” “instinct,” “power,” or “father imago”—statements that could as well be said about tigers and bears—and eagles and locomotives. So the symbolic approach helps locate an image within the tradition of the imagination.
A second advantage of the symbolic approach is that it relieves the dream of its narrowly personal oppression. We do therapy just by amplifying. For by looking up a symbol, we re-connect, re-member ourselves with the wider imagination. The symbolic approach opens a wide door into the riches of culture.
A third advantage follows from the second. Symbols have scope and echo. Any event seen symbolically takes on size; it gets universalized, gains transcendence beyond its immediate given appearance. One feels in touch with big meaning. Symbols give grandeur—and the delusion of grandeur. But now we are entering the disadvantages, so let’s move on.
When we look attentively at the two ways, symbolic and imagistic, we find they are not real alternatives. For there are no symbols as such, only images. Every psychic process is an image, said Jung. Symbols appear, only can only appear, in images and as images. They are abstractions from images. (Else we couldn’t look them up.) The only symbolic swans we can find as such are in a dictionary or index. Every other swan—Swan matches, Swan Lake, wild swans on the river Coole, or raping Leda, or pulling Aphrodite’s chariot—is located in a specific context, mood, and scene. Each symbol is articulated, vivified or deadened, by the image that presents it. A symbol cannot appear at all unless in an image.
But maybe a symbol is a certain sort of image—a big universal one? A great white bird lying dead is surely a symbol. Think of the albatross. But this won’t work either because we have lost the image of a swan in a cave, a particular cave with its particular feeling, and a swan dead with or from arrows in its breast, and particularly five arrows and presented together with my emotions and my action.
In other words, images that are generalized and conventionalized (dead white bird) have had their characteristic peculiarity erased. They no longer can rightly be called images. Any image that is taken as a symbol, by being stepped up to universal size, loses the precision of an image. The symbolic approach prevents the imagistic, mainly because the symbolic approach offers generality at the cost of precision.
Finally, a dream is an image because of this specific context, mood, and scene. It is not a symbol. This is evident from the fact that you cannot amplify a dream as such, only its symbols. They can be taken out of a dream, researched, painted, interpreted—but all this is not the dream, not the image. To put this another way: a dream is an entire image, no matter how fragmentary, how equivocal, which intra-relates its own images that in turn may contain symbols. A symbol may be an element of an image, but there can be images without any symbol at all.
Enter the Protestor: “Hold it! All this may be right if you want to set up a new theory, but it has little to do with how Jung defines symbolic:
Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue of an abbreviated designation for a known thing is semiotic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically expressed, is symbolic (CW 6: 815).
“Your distinction between symbol and image is nothing else but Jung’s between sign and symbol. You are turning symbols back into signs, whereas one of Jung’s major steps was to distinguish the two and give psychotherapy a fresh theory of symbol. Jung’s theory of symbols insists they are wholes, not elements. His theory points to their fundamental ineffability, their mystery, and paradoxical ambiguity. That’s why they “live” and can transform our psychic life forward. But you know all this as well as I, so why do you talk about symbols in terms of dictionaries and amplification. To think you can get the meaning of a symbol by looking it up is to miss Jung’s theory altogether.”
My friendly Protestor has made a useful distinction between Jung’s theory of symbols and the practice of looking them up. This lets me lay out my method in these notes. I want to be operational. I want to inquire by sticking to the actual phenomena. I want to talk about what we do and not what we think we do. This is to distinguish between Jungian method and methodology (—a tip from James Heisig, and see Stephanie de Voogd elsewhere in these pages*). Methods are the way we go about things and methodologies are the “ologies” we invoke to justify our methods. The first is actual tactics, the second the headquarters’ strategy, the theoretical definitions and plans for carrying them out.
I can put this difference between what we actually do and what we think we do also like this: To the question “What is a horse?” I can legitimately answer by defining or describing a horse. I can also legitimately answer by pointing at a horse or horses. If a child asks, I can answer best by pointing at. Moreover, and of first importance, pointing at can also be done by telling a dream with a horse, quoting a line of verse, fantasying a horse. Pointing at means horse-in-presentation, horse-in-image. Rather than answering by stating what a horse is, we answer by telling or showing what a horse is like—(a horse is like the animal we saw pulling the milk wagon in that film last night; it’s like our dog, but much bigger and with a shiny coat, and you can sit on top of it and ride fast; do you remember the policeman in front of the parade?—well, he was riding a horse).
By this method of pointing at, I am trying to return to the phenomenon: symbol in operation rather than symbol in definition. This difference can get out of hand: if the definition or description of horse no longer seems to cover what I see when I point at a horse, then our understanding of horses gained from theory (definition) is becoming delusional. It no longer conforms with actual horses. I think this has been happening with “symbol” in analytical psychology.
What goes on in the trenches of psychotherapy seems very different from the plan. When therapists speak or write of a dream with an egg or a coffin, the egg or coffin does not remain within the image, within its precisely qualifying context, nor does the egg or coffin remain “the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing” (Jung’s definition of symbol). More likely, the egg tends to be an “abbreviated designation” (sign) for fertility or growth or femininity; and the coffin, the negative mother or death. The symbols become stand-ins for concepts. Where theory declares them unknown, in practice we simply know what they mean at a glance. Our practice with symbols no longer accords with our theory of them.
This state of affairs has come about through the progressive development of symbology. We no longer practice Jung’s theory of symbols for they are no longer unknowns as they once were. We have suffered a historical change. Freud, Jung, and the second generation have reclaimed vast amounts of this “forgotten language.” Consciousness today is wide awake to symbols of all sorts. The task now is to get back to the unknown that only a few years ago lay in the symbol by exploring the image. (After all, our main concern is neither with symbol nor image but with the unknown that is the source of all depth psychology.)
Dream as image brings us back to the unknown. We stick to it in the image. There is nowhere else to go. And it can tell us about itself. So we set aside our collective consciousness that knows what dreams are, what dreams do, what they mean. The practice with dreams as images suspends our theory that relies on a symbolic approach. We do not want to prejudice the phenomenal experience of their unknownness and our unconsciousness by knowing in advance that they are messages, dramas, compensations, prospective indications, transitional objects, transcendent functions. We want to go at the image without the defense of symbols.
Protestor: “That’s naive. Even if you throw out or bracket the usual assumptions, you will just replace them with others. You have to have an approach of some sort, tools. What do you do with dreams?"
The first assumption is that a dream is an image and that an image is complete just as it presents itself. (It can be elaborated and deepened by working on it, but to begin with, it is all there: wholeness right in the image.) Next, we assume that everything there is necessary, which further suggests that everything necessary is there. Hence, the rule: “stick to the image” in its precise presentation (the cavernous place slopes down and back; I hurry without looking back; the arrows stick out at all angles from the breast; the swan is big (not small) and dead (not sick, or lively, or swimming) and white (not without color, or black).
Even if the images were less detailed (“any number of arrows,” “some arrows,” or “I think there were some arrows”), whatever is said is necessary to the precision of the image. Don’t take precision as some sort of fine-grained Ektachrome replication of detail—the more and sharper, the better. Precision means whatever is actually presented. Simply: the actual qualities of the image. Vagueness, dullness, indifference—and imprecision too—are also qualities. (“I felt ‘blah’ ”; “The dream was vague”; “I could only catch a fragment”—this, too, is image precision.) The more precision, the more actual insight.
In contrast with an image, a symbol stands out from its mood and scene, as the five arrows in the swan, taken as a symbol, become “the arrow” or “arrow.” As such, a symbol has no syntactical location or tonal shading, no feel to it, no necessary relation with its surrounding. There is nothing intrinsic to the arrow, that it be in a swan, in the breast of a swan, or that there be five of them. It is this salience of symbols that allows us to amplify them. This salience also encourages analyzing, taking the dream apart, looking up each symbol, one by one, and finding meaning through a process of de-coding their inter-relationships. The symbolic approach tends to break up an image; it is iconoclastic.
The imagistic approach considers each aspect of the dream as image (swan in the cave, arrows in the breast, hurrying toward day-light) and that these images are all intra-related. No image can be dealt with apart from the others and the enlightening of any one image sheds light on the others. Images are intrinsic to each other: in the dead-swan-cave my hurrying is towards brilliance which is a not-looking-back hurrying, an away from sloping downwards hurrying, and not looking back is for me to hurry. All the images of the dream adhere, cohere, inhere—this inhesion is fundamental to an image. Patricia Berry (“An Approach to the Dream,” Spring 1974) has already so well argued all this about the dream as an image that I do not need to do it again. She calls this, simultaneity of the image. All parts are co-relative and co-temporaneous. (In philosophical language, the parts are linked by “internal relations.”) A similar point about simultaneity and intra-relatedness is made by Rudolf Ritsema in his I Ching translations (presented in these pages since 1970). He speaks of it as the “syntax of the imaginal.”
Archetypal Image—One. Jung says archetypes per se are unknowable, irrepresentable, unspeakable. Let’s take this not as a metaphysical statement, but as an operational statement. Let’s work with it, seeing how the irrepresentable-unspeakable works in images.
Already we have progressed from archetype as noun, to archetypal as adjective. This is no mean progression! For we have just slipped through one of philosophy’s oldest brambles and all its tangled, thorny questions about participation between universals and particulars, noumenals and phenomenals, possibles and actuals. Instead of beginning with two distinct events—archetype and image—and asking how they relate, we begin with one event—archetypal image. We do not have to remove “archetypal” from “image,” for evidently when we do, archetypal eludes our abilities and becomes unknowable, irrepresentable, unspeakable. We would be blocked at the outset by the unknowability of what we were inquiring into. Clearly, it becomes a more fecund way of proceeding to inquire into just what modifications, if any, occur to an image when it is declared “archetypal.” This way, we are more likely to come upon what “archetypal” actually points to than were we to begin with the theoretical question, what are archetypes. In fact we do not even have to distinguish archetypal from image; we need ask only what is it in particular about an image that draws the modifier “archetypal.” So our focus remains on images.
What then is it about an image that we term archetypal? The first answer, symbols or the symbolic, simply displaces the problem. (If symbols made images archetypal, then we have only put our problem somewhere else. Then the question becomes, “What is the difference between archetypal and symbolic?” Unless we can discern a distinction, we have to admit they are identical, so that one or the other of the two terms is redundant.) But I think we can face the symbol answer head on by looking at our dream example.
Is this dream archetypal because of its symbols: cave, arrow, swan, dark-bright? If so, then any dream (image) that contains a symbol is archetypal. It is enough to have a tree, an animal, or even another person (child, shadow, animus, anima) in a dream for it to be archetypal. Extension to absurdity—yet, let’s grant the proposition that it is symbols which make images archetypal. Let us try to operate with the proposition even though we can’t draw the line between what is a symbol and what is not. (Are cars symbols? supermarkets? supermarket baskets? brown bags? check-out lines? check-out girls? boys who carry bags to cars? leashed dogs awaiting?)
The Protestor: “Not so fast. Jung once said: ‘Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiefly upon the attitude of the observing consciousness’ (CW 6, § 818). So those check-out girls and brown bags can indeed be viewed as symbols. I am sure I could amplify them in mythical and ritual terms so that you too could see their symbolic nature.”
Jung’s shifting the symbol problem from a kind of object to a kind of attitude in the subject seems to help—but does it? It is like Edward Casey’s statement that an image is not what you see, but the way that you see. The appeal is to a kind of seeing. But what is this kind of see-ing? If seeing with a symbolic attitude means seeing things as symbols, we are merely in a new begged question that is being answered with a new tautology.
So far all we can say is that because of Freud and Jung we can now sense symbols where once we couldn’t. They developed our symbolic consciousness. Freud helped us to see (or hear) “brown bag” as a sexual (female) symbol, and owing to Jung, we can recognize “check-out girls” as anima figures, and passing through their narrow examining lanes into the wide world, as a rite de sortie. Once we are in a symbolic attitude, we can indeed see anything as a symbol. But we have entered this symbolic attitude and see symbols because we have learned what symbols are by amplification, by symbology (Freudian, Jungian, Tarot, Christian, etc.). So, the symbolic attitude too is based on what we do or have done enabling us to see something as a symbol.
But to the dreams. Let’s look at one in which there are eight big symbols. And we state they are symbols by pointing at what people do in order to call them such. They store them and find them in collective depositories: dictionaries, indexes—of myths, fairytales and folklore, of motifs in the arts, religions, and depth psychology. First, the dream stripped down to its symbols. Operation I:
By a river, a baby plays with a lark and a pearl. Flowers are growing around. A hag carries by a box of shit.
Now, tell me why this doesn’t work?
Protestor: “There is no emotional happening; no one to whom it happens. It is as if it doesn’t matter. It is an image without deeper significance, and therefore it cannot be called archetypal."
I believe this image cannot be fairly called archetypal because it fails the “criterion of decorum” (Rosamund Tuve). The image is improperly expressed. Eight loaded symbols are washed out in a trivial statement. The indifferent declarative style does not suit them. Symbols alone don’t do the job; there must be something else for an image to be called archetypal. This something else seems first of all a matter of style—or, style makes things matter. We need not only symbols; we need a genre to embody them. Otherwise it’s like washing out the image power of a Christ, green and bleeding on the cross, in a nineteenth-century sentimental Italian-school painting. The vehicle must carry the symbol. So, operation II:
Once upon a time by a river there was a baby who played all day and every day with a lark and a pearl. Flowers grew all around the baby and one day a hag came by carrying a box of shit.
Now we have put the symbols into the genre of fairy tale, satisfying, I believe, the criterion of decorum. (To have put them into epic or tragedy would have been “undecorous.”) But still the image doesn’t seem to deserve the epithet “archetypal.” It is as if the tale has only got started. What little there is of narrative is a fragment. There is no conflict, no plot, no moral tension that takes hold of us when we read. Jung says that archetypes are carriers of meaning. This image bears no significant message. If one can say “so what” to an image, it is hardly archetypal. So, a third operation:
I was watching a baby by a river playing with a lark and a pearl. Flowers were growing around the baby when (or “but suddenly,” or “until,” or “however”) a hag came by carrying a box of shit.
Two things have changed. First, there is a dreamer, an observer with whom one can identify; and second, there is a rupture, a peculiar “hiatus” in the image (when, but, suddenly) caused by the introduction of a disjunction. The image now has an internal tension, the inklings of a plot, even a smolder of anticipation.
Protestor: “I still cannot feel it to be archetypal. It’s simply not big enough. Even though it has the tone of a tale (decorum) and is packed with well-known universal images (symbols), it remains remote and artificial. I know this could be said about most archetypal images—mandalas, cosmic clocks, heavenly visions, fairytale castles—yet there is nothing here that offers mystery, emotion, or meaningfulness. Let me re-write the eight symbols into what I would call a truly archetypal image. Operation IV:
A hag, who looked like my mother’s mother, had a screaming baby in a box, which she was either removing from or putting into a river. Suddenly, a lark dove down scattering flowers and shit all over them, and now in the box was a pearl. I felt frightened at first and then relieved.
”You see what I have done. Now there is emotion in the image itself (‘screaming,’ ‘suddenly,’ “dove down”). Then there is the dreamer’s personal engagement (‘I felt frightened,’ ‘my mother’s mother’). There is an ambiguity: ‘either removing from or putting into.’ So we don’t know what the hag is up to, a mystery of positive and negative. Then there are the definite mythological motifs of the old woman (mother’s mother, double mother, Great Mother) endangering a child by exposure, the helpful animal, rescue from above and by opposites (flowers and shit). And finally the whole thing is now a narrative. A story of transformation has happened. Can’t we call this image archetypal?”
We best test a hypotheses by attempting to falsify it. Therefore, let us rework the image by removing everything we have used to build it toward “the archetypal”—disjunctive hiatus, narrative, smoldering anticipation, the opposites and ambiguity, emotional involvement, and the mythological motifs, including the transformational plot. Not more of these but less. The fifth operation:
By a pale-blue and shallow river a sitting boy baby plays about idly with a singing lark in his right hand and a reflecting pearl in his left around the baby narcissus and dandelion flowers are growing a hag carries a box of shit.
This last version is a return to the first. The motifs of transformation, opposites, abandoned child, overt ambivalence, helpful animal, and dreamer-observer have all been excised. So has the emotion and the narration. Even more, the punctuation is gone disorganizing rhythm, syntax, and emphasis. Everything that we had been building up to get at “the archetypal” is gone.
The principal difference between the fifth version and the first is that some our symbols have now been precisely specified. Even if no expressed emotion, there is mood and scene. The symbols—without introducing any new connections between them or any affects—now provide a context for each other. (You may recall that I said at the beginning that these italicized items were important for making symbols into images.)
Reading and re-reading the image, hearing and re-hearing, we learn that sitting by a shallow river is sitting as a baby, and sitting as a baby is to have a singing lark in the right hand, and that happens when a box is in a hag’s hand. When narcissus and dandelion flowers grow, the river is pale-blue and shallow, and a baby plays idly. Idly playing is baby-playing even if with a reflecting pearl. What does a baby boy do with a reflecting pearl? A baby plays idly with it, and that happens when the river is pale blue. When boys play, hags carry; when hags carry shit, boys play larks. And is it all just going by, like a river going by and a hag going by?
More: What exactly is playing idly? Playing baby? Is it playing about (rather than straight playing with)? When there are pearls and larks, the flowers are “dandy-lions” and narcissus, and these flowers are growing a hag. Reflecting pearl, pearly reflection, is in his left—not hand. There is no left hand. Maybe, pearly reflection. Maybe, pearly reflection is “left around the baby narcissus” (just as it says without punctuation), and when the pearl is left around (because there is no left hand? because the hag carries?), then the river is shallow. But anyway, we do know this happens when he is sitting and playing idly with a right-hand lark or is having a right hand-lark. Flowers all around him are growing a hag, even while larky singing goes on together with playing about pearls, and a box of shit.
As we go through this chant, this singing the verses of an image as if it were a round or fugue (or written by James Joyce or Gertrude Stein), a deeper significance begins to resonate. The image amplifies itself without the act of amplification; that is, its volume increases through what Berry calls “restatement.” In alchemical terms, what we have been doing is an iteratio of the prima materia: going over and over again the same opaque “unpsychological” stuff, giving more and more possibility for connections to appear and psychic patterns to emerge. Psyche emerges, but not in straight messages given by interpretative meanings. Rather, psyche emerges as we merge with or get lost in the labyrinth of the image. Restatement and iteratio are also a mode of admitting one’s lostness in front of the image, which in turn heightens the value of the image.
If this had been your dream in therapy, one analogy after another would have struck home in regard to your fantasies and behaviors, your ambitions, your styles of reflection and sexuality, attitudes toward yourself, life, old women, boys, growth, and shit. The dream would have gathered value, that all-encompassing sense of importance we tend to call archetypal. “Archetypal” now is the result of an operation, given not with the image but with what happens with the image—a function of making rather than a function of being. The image grows in worth, becomes more profound and involving, that is, it becomes more archetypal as its patterning is elaborated. We are following Jung here quite strictly:
Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, the latter becomes clear. Actually the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning (CW 8, § 402).
It portrays. It makes a picture of its own meaning—not one supposed by interpretation. As shape emerges, meaning emerges. Image-making = meaning. And all this without our usual interpretative moves.
Protestor: “But I must intervene, for I think you did interpret. You did slant the chant in one direction only—toward condemnation of playing idly. You are against sitting like a baby and reflecting and having a lark. I could have re-sung the whole thing, bringing out the importance of singing, the left, the reflection, which lets the river of life carry away one’s shit just as the old woman does. In other words, the image could be read to feel the supportive role of mother nature and the value of playful idleness.”
No doubt an image catches us in a complex; of course, we slant the chant in the direction of the complex. There is no objective, no scientific, no pure work with images. We are always ourselves in the image and unconscious because of it.
However, your move, Protestor, is interpretive in that it singles out one or two motifs and arranges them to accord with a meaning (“supportive role of mother nature and the value of playful idleness”). You have left out the words: pale-blue, shallow, narcissus; you have not faced the actual words, such as “dandelion,” “plays about,” “the baby narcissus” (boy disappears). I grant my slant, but it is not the same kind as yours. For you have not stuck to the image, whereas mine derives from it and returns always to it. Moreover, I would now add your protest to the chant, as an additional Rabbinical commentary below the line, a further enrichment rather than an alternative interpretation. I insist: what we did was not reductive interpretation.
Maybe we should notice some of the more usual moves of interpretation so as better to realize what we did not do with the image.
1) We have not amplified the symbols (hag, river, pearl, etc.) by referring to their folklores, mythologies, and the like.
2) We tried not to single out or weight any part with more importance. We did not imagine the dream out from a central figure like “the shallow river,” or in the other case, “the dead swan.” This may be a valuable move in skewing the configuration into a new image for the sake of some therapeutic aim, but such a move is essentially reductive rather than imagistic. It puts the images in service of an overall view of them.
3) We did not read the images symbolically, i.e., river, old woman, and shit as symbols of the Great Mother of Life (Kali). This leads to your interpretation, Protestor, which actually distorts the image. For here the river is pale blue and shallow and not like an old woman and not shit-bearing. (The interpretation would, of course, take this approach further by insisting that the pale-blue and shallow aspects are an anima fascination having as their other pole the hag and shit, just as Kali presents these contrasting “side.”)
4) We did not use a developmental model, assigning psychodynamic functions to the images: the swan as “dead feeling-function”; the hurrying with our bad right leg as “inferior extraversion”; the hag as a still “untransformed mother complex.”
5) We neither put emotion in, searched for it, nor abstracted it out (as a fear dream, a pleasure dream). We tried to let the feel of the image stay in the image, the mood in the scene.
6) We did not press the image into a narration of dramatic sequences: Sitting and playing while life flows by leads to narcissus flowers and ends up in the shit of the mother complex. Or, in the other case, coming out into daylight is the result, the end of the story, the dramatic resolution. An image has no lysis. An image goes on and on without “resolving.” An image can have no lysis because it is not a drama—unless we look at it as such.
7) Without drama we do not need an agonist. The dreamer thus plays no central role as hero, but is interwoven in specific ways into the pattern of the image.
8) We did not moralize the image by finding some parts positive and others negative or by judging it regressive or progressive.
9) We did not programmize it by deriving a course of action from it (dream as message): “You should not let the feminine carry the shit for you.” Or this dream warns you about “your weak right side,” the “death-dealing power of Artemis or Apollo” (five arrows), or to “go back into the cave again and talk to the swan to revivify it.”
10) We did not sexualize it, which could have happened in terms of playing with birds and pearls in the hand.
11) We did not pathologize it, which could have happened in terms of seeing woman as hag whose box has shit in it or, in the other case, by concentrating on the symptomatic knee and anxiousness.
12) We did not personalize it by identifying the figures with the dreamer or any person in his entourage. Thus we never addressed the dreamer directly, and yet the image always addressed him indirectly, and his entourage by its analogies. We might have personalized by showing the “ego attitude” and then by addressing the dreamer as if he were that figure in the cave or by the river. Often this addressing the dreamer becomes a dressing down of the dreamer for what he should have done in the dream: at the turning point you made the wrong move, and so sprained your knee; if you hadn’t turned wrong, you wouldn’t have sprained your knee, and it would have come out all right; you shouldn’t run from the dark or go too deep into the unconscious for you get overwhelmed; or you have killed your animal and can’t face discovering this fact.
13) So we did not try to correct the dream by saying how it might better have been.
14) We did not mythologize, which could have happened with narcissus, reflection, and water, nor did we assign the image to an archetypal locus in the mother complex or the puer nor to any God.
Nonetheless, and this is quite remarkable, many of these very implications of the image—and again I rely on Berry—emerged as we went through our chanting and weaving. The interpretations appeared indirectly. All we did was “stick to the image,” i.e., stay faithfully close to the actual text. As Berry has pointed out, text and context refer to weaving:
The word “text” is related to weave. So to be faithful to a text is to feel and follow its weave … the dream is sensate, has texture, is woven with patterns offering a finished and full context … Image in itself has texture.
What I have done in the example was put into operation her approach to the dream.
Archetypal Image—Two. Let the Protestor begin: “The entire venture so far has depended on poetical images. My goodness—swans! And now larks and baby boys! Let us see something archetypal made of this dream, a bread-and-butter dream without high-blown symbols, maybe no symbols at all:
My sister is driving my Chevy and has a beer beside her. She pulls up at the curb to phone about getting the kitchen sink repaired. I can see through the window of the phone booth that she hasn’t got a dime.
As we already have shown in the supermarket/brown-bag example, we can see symbols anywhere once we go to work on the nouns through amplification. So here, too, we can “find” symbols: the Chevrolet as psychodynamic chariot, the sister as soul, the beer as fermented ritual drink usually made or distributed by women, the dime as a piece of silver …
But in this nitty-gritty example (in the genre of social realism) we are put to forego poetic echoes and symbolisms. We are challenged to be archetypal without being symbolic, without relying upon half-hidden values stored in “big” words (flowers, pearl, shit, etc.). So let’s start playing and put our ears to work.
When my sister drives, then her kitchen sink needs repair. When my sister drives, then she calls from the street. Or is my Chevy driving my sister, and that the result of the kitchen-sinkery of my sister-side of life not working? That is: is the repair-needing kitchen-sinkery of my sister-side of life what drives her behind the wheel of my Chevy? She hasn’t got a dime when she has a beer. Is she beside herself with beer? I see through to my sister in a booth. I only see through when my sister is in a booth behind a window; only when she pulls up. Only when she phones. Where there is a phoning sister, there is no driving sister. Alternatively, there is a driving sister and a phoning sister, and what happens in between is pulling up. So, what does this image say about my sister-drive? It says I am able to see it when it is boothed, for then there is a window to her. Boothing is both a way of calling, of getting in touch, and a way of distancing (tele), of being glass-walled. When seen through, she hasn’t got a dime—hence she is curbed, curbed to get her sink repaired. Her kind of sink, her place of sink is in the kitchen. Is sinking her mode of kitchen? In the kitchen is where she sinks—and it is for that that she calls for repair.
By this, I think, we have learned that an image does not have to contain any symbols or motifs that usually are considered archetypal. An image does not have to be shocking, freakish, or sick. An image does not have to have its emotion literalized (“I felt frightened”). There do not have to be big affects or explicit emotional words to make one feel the mood in an image or its emotional weight. Emotion as mood, as textural feel, is given with every image. None of the overt implications of an image have to be literally evident because through precisely portraying the patterns, as Jung said, the implications emerge. We do not have to know whether to take the sister on the subjective level as part of the dreamer or on the objective level as referring to an actual woman. We do not have to know whether this actual sister drinks or not, whether the dreamer is a man or a woman, has a sister or seven of them, whether there is a money problem now constellated, etc. As we play through the dream-work, one analogy after another resonates with many aspects of my life: my inner soul, my outer sister, my drive problem, my curb problem, my drinking problem, my money problem, my problems of communication, my sinking depression, how I call for repair, how I get insights, how I get stopped, and so on. These analogies can all be spun out of the dream’s implications, and the analogies receive precision by the intrarelation of the whole image. It is like looking at interlocking mechanisms at work: when this happens, then that happens. Cogs. I am given images for my problems and how they actually function in relation with each other. Even further problems, formerly unconscious, begin to emerge as I go through the weave of the image. Also, further implications of these problems and suppositions about them emerge.
The implications and suppositions in my chanting were mixed. I would consider all the “when/then” and “only” statements to be implications and all the questions and conclusion (“hence”) to be suppositions.
Now, what about archetypal? How does it come in? We have refused it entry through the symbolic, and in later chapters we shall equally refuse the identification of archetypal with emotion and with universality. So, in answer, I think we must refer the “archetypal” to these multiple implications of the image. What makes an image archetypal is that so much wealth can be got from it. An archetypal image is a rich image, even though its surface shows only a can of beer in a Chevy at the curb.
This subliminal richness is another way of speaking of its invisible depth, like Pluto is another way of speaking about Hades. Our exercise with the image gave us a new appreciation of the unfathomable nature of any image, even the meanest, once it dies to its everyday simple appearance. It becomes bottomlessly more layered, complicatedly more textured. And as we do our image-making, even further implications appear, more suppositions and analogies dawn on us. An image is like an inexhaustible source of insights. Mythologically, we are now talking about Hades who in the Neoplatonic Renaissance was the god of the greatest depth, mystery, and insight.
The depth only appeared, however, as we went deeper into it, quite got lost in it; and as we did go deeper into it, it got deeper. On the one hand, its inhesion became more evident—it became more and more internal, coherent. It began to feel necessary. Every part was necessary to every other part, an economic stringency, everything belonging. On the other hand, it became more and more mysterious and unfathomable. That is, the image became at the same time more coherent and more hidden. Heraclitus might have called this “the hidden harmony” which, too, refers to the underworld. (cf. my “The Dream and the Underworld,” Eranos-Yearbook 42 [1973]). There is an invisible connection within any image that is its soul. If, as Jung says, “image is psyche,” then why not go on to say, “images are souls,” and our job with them is to meet them on that soul level. I have spoken of this elsewhere as befriending, and elsewhere again I have spoken of images as animals. Now I am carrying these feelings further to show operationally how we can meet the soul in the image and understand it. We can actively imagine it through wordplay, which is also a way of talking with the image and letting it talk. We watch its behavior—how the image behaves within itself. And we watch its ecology—how it interconnects by analogies in the fields of my life. This method is indeed different from “diagnostic interpretation.” No friend or animal wants to be interpreted, even though it may cry for understanding.
We might equally call that unfathomable depth in the image “love” or, at least, say we cannot get to the soul of the image without love for the image.
Once we get into the soul of the image, many of the other interpretative moves (mentioned in the previous chapter) become unnecessary. They may be regarded as means to give the image soul by literally connecting it to the dreamer’s person. But the hidden connections are best, Heraclitus said, and this because the connections are there a priori in the person of the dreamer who dreamt them. The connections do not have to be forced into literal (outer) life by personal associations or personalistic interpretations. The method I am sketching can make dreams and images “matter” without having to reduce them to the personal. So all those distinctions between inner and outer, personal and archetypal, subjective and objective are heuristic at best. When we work the image through by means of metaphorical analogies, the hidden connections ramify on all levels into all places. These connections also operationally prevent separations into such theoretical pairs.
Two things to observe in passing. One: our method can be done by anyone, in or out of analysis. It requires no special knowledge—even if knowledge of symbols can help culturally to enrich the image, and knowledge of idioms and vocabulary can help hear further into the image. By letting the image itself speak, we are suggesting that words and their arrangements (syntax) are soul mines. But mining doesn’t require modern technical tools. (If it did, no one would ever have understood a dream or an image until modern psychology came along!) What does help mining is an eye attuned to the dark. (We shall have to take up later the question of training, how to coach the eye to read the image, the ear to hear it.) Two: our method is not to be taken literally, as if all dreams must only be played through according to Hillman’s New Verbal Technique. The demonstrations here are not of a new method but of a mode by means of which certain theoretical and practical considerations concerning images can be exposed. There are all sorts of things one can do with dreams and other images. Of main importance is that we recognize what in analysis we have been doing and been taking for granted and now what else we might be doing, what else images can be heard to say when listened to more acutely.
After this we can now essay a statement about what it is that makes an image “archetypal.” We have found our axiomatic criteria—dramatic structure, symbolic universality, strong emotion—not required in our actual operations with an image. We have found instead that an archetypal quality emerges through a) precise portrayal of the image; b) sticking to the image while hearing it metaphorically; c) discovering the necessity within the image; d) experiencing the unfathomable analogical richness of the image.
Since any image can respond to these criteria, any image can be considered archetypal. The word “archetypal” as a description of images becomes redundant. It has no descriptive function. What then does it point at?
Rather than pointing at something, “archetypal” points to something, and this is value. By attaching “archetypal” to an image, we ennoble or empower the image with the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance. “Archetypal,” as we use it, is a word of importance (in Whitehead’s sense), a word that values.
We found that the word does not single out one image from others: the Chevy-beer-dime image offered as much richness and depth as did the cave-swan-knee image, even though the latter was more symbolic Even while not adding anything descriptive, the word “archetypal” does value the image by pointing to fecundity (Langer) and generativity (Erikson). We need the term to encourage our searching, to make us feel the transcending importance of the image. The fecundity and generativity suggested by “archetypal” is of a special kind in a special direction. This has been indicated by my use of words such as unfathomable, patterned, hidden, rich, prior, deep, necessary, permanent. These are the words we have used to give a sense of value. All images gain this value as their volume extends by means of our image-making work.
Should we carry this conclusion over to other places where we use “archetypal,” to our psychology itself, then by archetypal psychology we mean a psychology of value. And our appellative move is aimed to restore psychology to its widest, richest, and deepest volume so that it would resonate with soul in its descriptions as unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative, and necessary. As all images can gain this archetypal sense, so all psychology can be archetypal when it is released from its surface and seen through to its hidden volumes. “Archetypal” here refers to a move one makes rather than a thing that is. Otherwise, archetypal psychology becomes only a psychology of archetypes.
“Only a psychology of archetypes” would mean one that takes archetypal as an adjective derived from a noun. To this noun, archetype, we must address any question about “archetypal.” This further leads to a denotative sense of archetypal, as descriptive of fundamental structures, posited abstractions which have been adduced from myths and religious texts, from social institutions (like the family and state), from animal behavior (like nest-building), from philosophical and scientific ideas (like causality), from art forms (like epics).
In most contexts where we come across the word archetypal, especially in relation with image (“that is an archetypal image”), archetypal could readily be replaced by one or another of the backgrounds on which it relies: mythical, religious, institutional, instinctual, philosophical, or literary.
But there is a difference of feeling between saying “the circle is a scientific or philosophical idea” and saying, “the circle is an archetypal idea.” Archetypal adds the further implication of basic root structure, generally human, a necessary universal with consequents. The circle is not just any scientific idea; it is basic, necessary, universal. Archetypal gives this kind of value.
Now if the value implication is taken literally, we begin to believe that these basic roots, these universals are. We have moved from a valuative adjective to a thing and invented substantialities called archetypes that can ’back up’ our sense of archetypal value. Then we are forced to gather literal evidence from cultures the world over and make empirical claims about what is defined to be unspeakable and irrepresentable.
We do not need to take archetypal in this literal sense. Then the implications of basic, deep, universal, necessary, all those implications carried by the word archetypal, add richer value to any particular image.
Unfortunately, however, the literal sense of archetypal prevails. So, when an image is called archetypal this conventionally denotes that we are in the presence of a basic instinctual pattern or a root philosophical idea or a universal religious theme. Now if that is what archetypal has come to mean, then where is psychology? Have we not slipped away into metapsychology, or even metaphysics, examining an empyrean of abstractions, gathering evidence to literalize them even further. If that’s where we are, let’s either stay there and work it out with our colleagues in these fields of religion, philosophy, and social institutions, or let’s return to psychology as an ongoing operation with the soul’s images, where the term archetypal connotes rather than denotes, gives importance rather than information, evokes rather than describes, and where by recognizing value it furthers inquiry into our images.
A descriptive definition of “archetypal” would turn our inquiry down old tracks. We would then be inquiring into images in terms of their archetypes, and we would end up back in symbology: images of the Great Mother, of the Hero, of the different Gods. To go in this direction would be to follow on the heels of analytical psychology, which could have meant (and did at times with Jung, e.g., his Types) an analyzing psychology and an analyzing of psychology (see Wolfgang Giegerich elsewhere in these pages**), and instead has come to mean a psychology of analysis by analysts for analysts. Similarly, we would be following what happened to depth psychology, which first meant a deeper psychology, deepening psychology below mere conscious functions, but which then became a psychology of literalized depths or “the unconscious.”
To the question “what is an archetypal image?,” we answered with an inquiry into the image (and not the archetype) and thus came out somewhere unexpected. It has led us to revision “archetypal’ itself, for we found it didn’t “say” anything directly about the image. Now two modes of operating with the word “archetypal” begin to appear, descriptive and valuative. And these can be two directions in our work. We can press further and more precisely into a descriptive psychology of the archetypes (see Murray Stein elsewhere in these pages***), and we can work further at revisioning psychology in the valuative sense of archetypal. This re-visioning of archetypal implies that the more accurate term for our psychology in its operational definition is revisioning. In what we do we are more revisionists than archetypalists; or, we evoke archetypes (Gods and myths) in order to revision psychology. The value for revisioning psychology of a psychology of the archetypes is that it types is that it provides a metaphorical tool of widest, richest, and deepest volume. It conforms with the soul value we wish to give to and find in our work.
The danger of the first mode is that it can become literal, the danger of the second, that it can become wholly a phenomenological exercise. The first can coagulate so that before we know it we are strangled in a new typology—Gods and Goddesses as stereotypical models on a tight network for placing everything. The second can get dissolutional so that all we do is move words around in an existential vacuum, anything as good as everything else in endless widespread analogies. As Robert Romanyshyn has said, phenomenology and archetypal psychology need each other. Phenomenology needs the sense of mythic structures in the background and their deep values; archetypal psychology needs the de-literalizing, sometimes humorous, sense of metaphor in the foreground. So, too, the two senses of archetypal, descriptive and operational, need each other. Both occur together in images from which both derive in the first place.
Reduction and Analogy. The whole business of working with images is to make them matter. Analysts try to make them matter by employing various kinds of reduction. “Going up the driveway and into the house” means entering the vagina and wishing to return to the mother = sexual reduction. “Going up the driveway …” means coming to this hour and my office and our relationship = transference reduction. “Going up the driveway …” refers to your attitudes toward home, wife, and family = personalistic reduction. “Going up the driveway …” presents the root condition of life on earth, traveling, dwelling, and homecoming = existential reduction.
All these reductive interpretations, the very reductive move itself, arise as naive psychological attempts to materialize the dream (Berry, “On Reduction,” Spring 1973). As if by concentrating the dream down to a single meaning, it would be reduced to an essential, to be more tangibly felt and have more impact.
We can also make the dream matter by analogies. analogy follows another notion of matter, that of extension. By spreading the dream out, disclosing connections all over the place, an imagen takes on weight and can even make me feel that I am walking on its ground, that I am everywhere in the dream rather than it in me.
Analogy follows another notion of matter, that of extension. By spreading the dream out, disclosing connections all over the place, an image takes on weight and can even make me feel that I am walking on its ground, that I am everywhere in the dream rather than it in me.
Analogy is a word used in comparative anatomy for referring to a relation where there is a likeness in function but not in origin. For instance, there are analogies between the hag with the box of shit and images of crones in legends, witches in fairy tales, the Goddess Kali, putrefying corpses in coffins, even memory images of my grandmother, or a smelly old schoolteacher: they look alike, function alike, feel alike. But we do not have to go one step further and claim the hag is an image of the Great Mother archetype; for this relation expressed by the genitive “of” would then be one of origin: as if the mother archetype generates hag (and other images) of the archetype. Analogies keep us in the functional operation of the image, in the patterns of similarities, without positing a common origin for these similarities. The operative term is “like.” This is like that. A dream:
There is a black dog, with a long tail, that shows its teeth at me. I am terribly afraid.
Analogizing is quite an easy procedure. We simply ask the dreamer, “What is this dog, this scene, this fear, like?” Then we get: It’s like when there is a sudden sound, and I jump with fright; like coming to analysis and expecting you to pounce on everything I say; like anger—sometimes I get so angry (or hungry) that I could savage anyone who gets near me; like my ulcer that gets angry and hungry at the same time; like my mother used to look—her teeth; like going home after work in the dark and being afraid my wife will bark at me, jump at me; it’s like dying—I’m so afraid—it’s so vicious and low and degrading; it’s like a film I saw when I was little with black dogs in it and had to leave the movie theater because I was so terrified; like the Jackal God Anubis; like Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust; like when I get sexy—I want to tear into the meat and just eat and screw like a dog in the street, anywhere; it’s like the dog was a snake with a long tail. And so on.
Here we see a main difference between analogizing and reducing. Should any one of the above analogies be taken as the meaning of the image, I would lose the others. I would have narrowed the image down to only one place where it matters. Analogies are multiple and don’t lose the others; they don’t lose the dog either. They keep the image there, alive and well, returning to it each time for a fresh sense of it. Interpretation translates it into a meaning. And most interpretations are reductive in one way or another.
Analogizing is like my fantasy of Zen, where the dream is the teacher. Each time you say what an image means, you get your face slapped. The dream becomes a koan when we approach it by means of analogy. If you can literalize a meaning, “interpret” a dream, you are off the track, lost your koan. (For the dream is the thing, not what it means.) Then you must be slapped to bring you back to the image. A good dream analysis is one in which one gets more and more slaps, more and more analogies, the dream exposing your entire unconsciousness, the basic matters of your psychic life.
Protestor: “I hear you saying: more equals good. The more you can say about the dog, the better it is and the surer you are about not knowing what that dog really means! This leads you all over the map. And I can’t see the difference between Freud’s method of associating all through memory, or Jung’s method of amplifying all through history and culture. They each have the effect of losing the image—which is your very concern to stick to.
“Moreover, analogizing seems impractical. In therapy we need to get down to where it’s really at, to essentials. Surely, some two or three of these analogies are more relevant to the patient’s problem than his mother’s teeth, say, or Goethe’s Mephistopheles. Is there no hierarchy among the analogies? Are they all equally good? Doesn’t analogizing in therapy finally depend on an ‘A-ha; experience, the ‘click’ in the patient that tells you when to stop, when you’ve got to it?”
Knowing when to stop and where to stop, as David Miller and Howard McConeghey have each said, is the whole art of any art. This is an animal-knowing, an animal sense of essential—not instinctive only, not given only, but a refined skill coming from practice with images. But it’s not that damned magical click! One of the Great Delusions of therapy—I’ll tell you why in another installment.****
Excerpted from the draft of a work in progress, parts of which were read at the annual conference on Jung at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, April 1977. Dedicated to Patricia Berry and friends of the Dallas Seminar on Archetypal Psychology, 1977.
NOTES
* Stephanie de Voogd, “C. G. Jung: Psychologist of the Future, ‘Philosopher’ of the Past,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1977): 175–82.
** Wolfgang Giegerich, “On the Neurosis of Psychology or the Third of the Two,” ibid., 153–74.
*** Murray Stein, “Hera: Bound and Unbound,” ibid., 105–19
**** James Hillman, “Further Notes on Images,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1978): 152–82.
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1977): 62–88
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