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This is the second volume to appear on analytical psychology in this series, the first being Psychological stages of feminine development by Neumann. It is a paperback in a format and print which make it most agreeable to handle and read.
In an introduction on the symbol as transformer, Mario Trevi touches on the many
uses and meanings of the word ‘symbol’ and their qualitative differences, and suggests that there is a denominator common to all of them; namely, the symbol is the dimension any object, natural or artificial, acquires the moment it evokes a reality not inherent in it. He notes that, in the last two centuries, it was the Romantics who gave the symbol the status of an interpretative category of natural and psychic reality, championing the ‘dreaming’ side of man in the face of cartesian reason and the hegelian rationalistic synthesis; and that, in our time, we are indebted to Ernst Cassirer for his observation that man can equally well be defined as a ‘symbolic’ as a ‘rational’ animal, so that we can now allow that the specificity of man is somehow linked with his capacity to create symbols.
Trevi then turns his attention to the differing views on the symbol held by Freud and Jung. He points out that for Freud its function was to annul tension and restore equilibrium by unconscious repression of the unacceptable ‘already-lived’, whereas for Jung its function was to excite tension and to reveal and transform the ‘not-yet lived’. He declares himself dissatisfied with Jung's distinction between sign and symbol, since he considers it impossible to exclude either the semiotic dimension from the symbol or the symbolic dimension from what Freud called a symbol, but Jung regarded as merely a sign.
Moreno opens on man as a symbolic animal and the symbolic nature of all cultural phenomena, arguing that man's psychic disturbances can be understood as disturbances of the symbolic function and are thus closely connected with culture, seen as a symbolic system of values