Jung, Carl, et al. Man and His Symbols. Aldus, 1964. Bantam, 2023.
It has been a long time since I read anything by Jung and when I saw this book in my local bookstore, I realised that I could not remember actually reading this collection of essays. Certainly, it was not on my shelf next door to Memories, Dreams, and Reflections or Sallie Nichols’ Jung and the Tarot, which I’ve been promising myself to re-read sometime soon.
One doesn’t hear so much about Jung now as when I was in university, and even then, I realise now, most of my professors and fellow students were already beginning to turn their attention to such modes of analysis as structuralism, narratology, and deconstruction. As you can see, I was introduced to Jungian thought as it applied to literature rather than as it applied to psychology. I have no idea how Jung’s work is regarded by today’s practicing analysts and counsellors. Further, note how I say “Jungian thought” rather than the works of Jung. I must admit how most of my earlier experience with Jung was at second hand. One would discuss archetypes and animas without necessarily having read Jung himself, and it was almost too easy as a precocious student to discuss Jungian influences in the films of Ingmar Bergman or the criticism of Northrup Frye.
It was with these thoughts in mind, then, that I began reading Man and His Symbols. It’s a collection of articles introduced by John Freeman who outlines the history behind the book’s genesis and the influence of Wolfgang Foges of Aldus Books who wanted Jung to “undertake a new book designed, not for the clinic or the philosopher’s study, but for the people in the market place” (ix). Jung eventually gave in to persuasion and chose the other contributors to the work: Joseph Henderson, “Ancient Myths and Modern Man”; M, -L. Von Franz, “The Process of Individuation” and “Science and the Unconscious”; Aniela Jaffé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts”; and Jolande Jacobi, “Symbols in an Individual Analysis.” Jung died in June 1961, but Freeman assures us that although Foges did not publish Man and His Symbols until 1964, the book’s direction, order and focus had been “laid down—and in detail—by Jung himself” (x).
As I began reading, therefore, I realised I was dealing with something of a summary of Jung’s work on symbols, and I was meeting Jung and his work at the end of his career, at a time when his ideas were already if not mainstream then generally known about if not fully understood. I also realised that the book itself and the individual articles could hardly avoid being of their own time, that is the mid-twentieth century.
It isn’t surprising, therefore, that the aspect of the work that struck me most was the way it felt dated. Would writers today whether writing for a lay or professional audience use quite such gendered language as we find in Man and His Symbols? How comfortable would we be today using the word “primitive”? Nevertheless, I found the book engaging, especially “Symbolism in the Visual Arts.” I was also interested by the way the ideas of Jung, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg converge in their sense of what Bohr defined as “complementarity.” In “Science and the Unconscious,” M. -L. von Franz explains how “the unconscious can only be approximately described (like the particles of microphysics) by paradoxical concepts” (381).
It’s sixty years since Man and His Symbols first appeared in print and 121 years since Jung submitted his dissertation Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phänomene (On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. How many psychologists whether academics or clinical practitioners would today describe themselves as Jungians? How many literary critics would do so? Possibly more of the latter than of the former. However, the fact that Penguin Random House felt it worthwhile for their Bantam imprint to bring out an edition of Man and His Symbols is surely testimony to the continuing importance of Jung’s theories. I’m glad I took the time to reconsider him.
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