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Theseus was hero enough to slay the Minotaur but without Ariadne's thread to guide him he would never have found his way back through the labyrinth. Anthony Stevens's book offers every reader the opportunity to find their own Ariadne and hence negotiate their own path through the labyrinth of the psychoid.
The book is divided into two parts, the main one being a thesaurus of symbolic terms divided into four sections: ‘The physical environment’ ‘Culture and psyche’; ‘People, animals and plants’; and ‘The body’. Each section is enhanced by a number of diagrams or black and white line drawings. These are in turn preceded by an explanatory paragraph that engagingly draws the reader into the symbolic world, presenting it not as a foreign country but as an age-old part of us all that we know but may not know we know, which may have become half-forgotten or neglected, but is the stuff our dreams are made of and the language of pillow talk between the ego and the self.
Stevens's approach to symbolism is psychobiological, combining the perspectives and experience of a Jungian analyst and psychiatrist. Symbols for him are not the material of repressed psychopathology but are living, intuitive concepts with a life cycle within which they generously beckon us towards life enhancement. The thesaurus is not intended to be a dictionary with definitions and answers but is offered to the reader with the shared understanding that we all have an innate symbol forming propensity which is archetypal and an integral part of the psyche. Symbols appear through a common language - ‘the natural Esperanto of humanity’. The text opens up possibilities for the reader beyond the thinking function: meaning and symbolism are to be felt and also to be sensed intuitively. With every function of the psyche open to experience of the microcosm, a relationship is found to the macrocosm which transcends the archetypal and the cultural but remains uniquely personal with each of us. My meaning is not your me