The “Great and Puzzling Problem” of Symbols

In this letter to Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866-1945), an American physician, teacher, medical editor, and pioneering psychotherapist, Jung discusses schizophrenic patients and includes examples of drawings they produced.

The images contain what Jung termed “Bruchlinien,” breaking lines that split the pictures, apparently indicative of the patients” mental states. Jung here wonders whether “unconscious symbolization has a meaning or aim at all or whether it is merely reactivated stuff, i.e., relics of the past.”

However, in the Red Book Jung wrote that “if one accepts a symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one did not previously know . . . .Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols.”

Image: Letter from Carl G. Jung to Smith Ely Jelliffe, October 16, 1932. Smith Ely Jelliffe Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of…

Amen, you are the lord of the beginning.
Amen, you are the star of the East.
Amen, you are the jfower that blooms over everything.
Amen, you are the deer that breaks out of the forest.
Amen, you are the song that sounds far over the water.
Amen, you are the beginning and the end. ~Carl Jung; Red Book.

126 In “Dreams,” Jung noted on January 3, 19I7: “In Lib. nov. snake image III incent” [stimulus to snake image III in Liber NOvus] (p. I). This notation appears to refer to
this image.
127 Image legend: “brahmallaspati.” Julius Eggling notes that “Brihaspati or Brahmanaspati, the lord of prayer or worship, takes the place of Agni, as the representative of the priestly dignity … In Rig-Veda X, 68,9 … Brihaspati is said to have found (avindat) the dawn, the sky and the fire (agni), and to have chased away the darkness…

A Blind Alley to be Avoided: Isolation

WHEN MAN has realized that he carries the world’s fortune in himself and that a limitless future stretches before him in which he cannot founder, his first reflex often leads him along the dangerous course of seeking fulfillment in isolation.

In one example of this-flattering to our private egotism- some innate instinct, justified by reflection, inclines us to think that to give ourselves full scope we must break away as far as possible from the crowd of others. Is it not in our aloofness from our fellows, or alternatively in their subjection to ourselves, that we will find that ‘utmost limit of ourselves’ which is our declared goal? The study of the past teaches us that, with the onset of reflection, an element partially liberated from phyletic servitudes began to live for itself. So is it not in a line continuous with that…

Carl Jung’s Illumination #119 from The Red Book.

I am he, the nameless one, who does not know himself and whose name is concealed even from himself I have no name, since I have not yet existed, but have only just become. To myself I am an Anabaptist and a stranger. I, who I am, am not it. But
I, who will be I before me and after me, am it. In that I abased myself I elevated myself as another. In that I accepted myself I divided myself into two, and in that I united myself with myself I became the smaller part of myself I am this in my consciousness. However, I am thus in my consciousness as if I were also separated
from it. I am I [Image119] I not in my second and greater state, as if I were this second and greater one mysel£ but…

This is a portrait of Izdubar. Izdubar was an early name given the figure now known as Gilgamesh, based on a mistranscription. It resembles an illustration of him in Wilhelm Roscher’s Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie. Jung discussed the Gilgamesh epic in 1912 in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, using the corrected form. His use of the older form here indicates that the figure is related to, but not identical to the figure in the epic. Jung encounters Izdubar in a fantasy. Jung says that he comes from the West, and tells Izdubar about the setting of the sun, the roundness of the earth, and the emptiness of space. Izdubar wants to know where he gets his knowledge from, and whether there is an immortal land where the sun goes for rebirth. Jung says he comes from a world where this is science. Izdubar is aghast to…