CG Jung: symbols as bridge builders between the conscious and the unconscious

Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung devoted his life's work to understanding symbols and mental images. In Jung's view, symbols are a kind of bridge between the conscious and unconscious minds. While our conscious mind is the everyday stream of thoughts that we are aware of, the unconscious is home to a vast array of subconscious memories, instincts, and archetypes—universal basic patterns of the human mind. Jung believed that these deeper layers could not be accessed directly through reasoning, but rather sought to emerge through symbols.

“A symbol is the best possible expression for something unknown,” Jung stated in his work Psychology and Alchemy , suggesting that symbols not only depict the known, but also hint at something deeper, as yet unfathomable.

Dreams are a good example: in our dreams, the unconscious mind sends us messages in the form of images and stories. Jung wrote that the characters and events in dreams can represent these archetypal forces or personal unresolved issues. Similarly, spontaneous mental images, slips of the tongue, or even strong reactions to a work of art can be signs of the unconscious in symbolic guise. Symbols are the language of the unconscious – in fact, the Finnish title of Jung's late major work is tellingly Symbols: The Language of the Subconscious .

“Dreams are a small hidden door into the deepest and most intimate sanctuary of the soul,” Jung writes in Man and His Symbols . This idea well encapsulates how symbols, and especially dreams, can serve as a gateway to deeper self-understanding.

A significant insight of Jung is that symbols not only reflect our psychic processes, but by studying them we can also expand our own consciousness. According to Jung, a person can make the unconscious conscious precisely through symbols: when we encounter a recurring symbol in our dreams or in our life and begin to reflect on its meaning, we build a bridge between the subconscious and the conscious.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will guide your life and you will call it fate," it has been said, paraphrasing Jung. This idea describes how unrecognized inner forces can carry us if we do not bring them to light. Symbol work is a way to bring these forces to light in a safe and constructive way.

Jung developed the method of active imagination, in which a person is encouraged to engage in dialogue with internal images – in this way, symbols act as mirrors from which one can gradually recognize the contents of one's own soul. As Jung noted, symbols always combine emotion and thought, personal and universal. They are at the same time personal messages from the subconscious and part of the common imagery of humanity.