What is A Symbol Supposed to Be?

The idea of the symbol has stood in the centre of the development of analytical thought for many years. So it was also in pre-analytic times, when it was philosophers and especially aesthetes who devoted much energy to the elaboration of this concept. One of them, F. Vischer (Vischer, 1887, p. 154), in a paper which stimulated Aby Warburg, the founder of the Warburg Institute, explicitly stated that the concept was a shapeshifting Proteus, difficult to seize and to pin down. Owing to this awareness, those early workers did not take anything for granted, in contrast with a good many modern psychologists of all denominations, men of letters, historians, philosophers, and linguists who, when using this term, take for granted that they and their readers know what they are talking about. Jung, too, in the Psychology of the Unconscious, written in 1912, first published in England in 1917, seems to take the meaning of symbolism for granted. In the field of analytical psychology “symbol” is occasionally used as the equivalent of simile even in our days, e.g. when it is said that “every system in the whole of the cosmos down to the atom is a SIMILE of the constitution of the human soul”-“dass jedes System in ganzen Kosmos bis zum Atom ein GLEICHNIS ist fiir die Verfassung der Menschenseele” (Morawitz-Cadio, A., 1955, p. 17.) (My capitals.) In any case, the literature on the subject is so vast that I will pick out only those views which have helped me to clarify the concept.

The form of the word “symbol” shows that it holds many passports, i.e. it is a Greek immigrant which has been naturalized in many lands, and its meaning has consequently been tinged by the verbal community in which it has acclimatized. To us it has come via France which it reached from Italy where simbolo is used also to designate the creed of the apostles because belief is closely associated with it (Denzinger, 1937). In common parlance it stands for:

1. (a). Something which represents or typifies another thi