Anthony Stevens on symbols
It is interesting to look at the human use of
symbols as a innate way to communicate what goes on in
our consciousness. The use of images to express what we experience can be seen
as a step in human evolution, a tool mankind created
to survive and cope with his world. We could see symbols as an earlier, older
expression, of another order than structured words. Symbols describe reality
and “carry” concepts in a different way than words do. Stevens shows that
symbols express an extra dimension, evolved through ages of human experience, that we have a hard
time “catching” in words.
Humans seem to have evolved their capability to
express themselves in accordance to their needs. Primitive man developed
different communicational skills for a different day-to-day life than modern
man did for his way of life. We evolved from a world where man lived in and
from nature to a world where survival depends for a great deal on information
(knowledge?), money and the power to manipulate. Our ways to become conscious,
organize our thoughts and express ourselves have
evolved through human history. Although we became very word-minded, symbols
still linger in our consciousness as a fundamental way of experiencing reality.
The trouble we encounter with the study of symbols
is that in order organize our thoughts we try to translate them into words.
Because a symbol is of a different order, with each translation it looses part
of its original essence. It is like we try to describe
music in a painting, words cut away dimensions trying find some order, some
rational categorization or conceptualization, thus limiting the image we
perceive of the symbol. Stevens notes this when he remarks that language
dissects, divides, and breaks things down into packages of meaning. The symbol,
on the other hand, assembles concepts into integrate Gestalts.
Anthony Stevens, a distinguished British Jungian
analyst, psychiatrist and writer on Jungian themes, is a graduate of
In his book Ariadne’s Clue
(1998) he describes symbols as living entities with a
life-cycle of their own; as imaginal forms which
process a dynastic relationship to symbols that have preceded them. In this
book Stevens aims to explain the meaning of symbols in terms of their
psychodynamic importance and creates an allusive field of meanings for each of
them.
It seems Stevens tries to present scientific
evidence for Jung’s theory of archetypes. It is definitely a study in human
behavior. He positions symbols in a perspective that honors their evolutionary
or prehistoric origins, thus revealing their archetypal roots. He tries to
trace each symbol back through time to its universal configuration, its psycho-biological foundation.
It is clear to see that Stevens loves symbols; he
goes beyond mere interpretation in search for a deeper understanding of the
human “symbolic talent”. This book is an act of homage to this talent: “…like
all lovers”, he writes, “I wanted to learn everything I could about symbols and
the symbolic genius of humankind”.
How do we, humans, make symbols?
An object, a thing, becomes a symbol when it appears
to contain something “more” than the object itself. The symbolic object
embodies meanings and feelings beyond those implicit in the actual object. This
means that a distinction has to be made between an
object and its symbolic value. An object is an object. Its symbolic value is derived from the thoughts and emotions it evokes in us;
from the increased weight of meaning.
A symbol is not something that can
be consciously invented or specified by convention, but something that comes
into existence spontaneously. Stevens elaborates on symbol creation. He
distinguishes three principles that are involved: resemblance (meaningful analogies, a reference to a shared
essence), condensation whereby many
meanings are drawn together into one configuration , and the microcosmic principle, whereby the macrocosm is felt to be in
the microcosm, the cosmic tree represented by the tree, the eternal revealed in
the transitory, the universal in the particular.
So
a symbol is a transitory embodiment of all that is analogous and associated
with it. It’s magical quality seems to lie in its
capacity to speak to many levels of experience at once.
Jung argued that verbal language (being rational and
deductive) is not adequate to formulate a symbol. A symbol[1]
in his view represents a relatively “unknown” thing. The unknown aspect points
to something more than consciousness can consciously know. With the creation of a symbol something unconscious is connected with
consciousness, resulting in the experience of a new, added, meaning. Jung called this bridge-building capacity of the
psyche, the ability to unite known with unknown elements in one symbolic form,
the transcendent function.
We could also look at human development. By the time
they are three children develop the ability to attribute mental states to other
people, animals and things as a means to understand their behavior or
functioning. In this way they intuit for instance the
feelings, beliefs and desires that cause people to do and say the things they
do (intuitive psychology[2]).
At about the same time, children learn to grasp the essence of different types
of things which enables them to classify for instance
animals, plants and objects (intuitive biology2). A combination of these two
capacities seems to be at work when humans attribute human mentalities and
feelings to an object, and thus give it a symbolic meaning.
Where do these meanings come from?
Apart from the obvious cultural and personal sources
of meaning, Stevens implies that symbols carry implicit meanings for all
members of our species. These meanings are in his view somehow codified in our
brains and psyches, evolved as a consequence of human
life and survival under environmental circumstances typical of this planet.
Stevens explains how most
interpreters and compilers of dictionaries or encyclopedias of symbols still
work from a limited perspective based on the idea that biology can not possibly
make any significant contribution to the structure and function of the human
mind. They see the human psyche as a tabula rasa, free of all content other than what living and
culture put into it.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)[3],
for instance, saw symbolism as an inferior form of intellectual activity,
reducing the symbol to individually repressed psychopathology and viewing
symbolic behavior as being acquired through learning and personal experience
only. Jean Piaget (1896-1980)[4],
the influential Swiss (!) developmental psychologist, even argued that symbolic
thinking was wholly subjective and “not adapted to reality”, and therefore a
mere childish expression.
Most anthropologists from that period regarded all
symbolic meanings as culturally relative, derived from the social context in
which they had arisen.
Carl Jung (1875-1961) however was one of the first
to claim that human beings possess an innate symbol-forming capacity. He
considered this an integral and healthy part of our total psyche. The human
creative symbolizing ability proceeds, according to Jung, on an archetypal basis which gives rise to unique symbolic formations. We
will discuss this further.
Anthony Stevens and John Price[5]
are convinced that the human mind evolved, in the course of its evolutionary
history, the capacity to think, to use symbols, to develop explanations and to
create myths. In this vision, the mental apparatus evolved as a result of
selection pressures; to meet specific adaptive problems the human psyche
created archetypes, or modules of behavior, providing the rules to be followed and the necessary
ways of knowing and information to be shared.
What became fixed in the
genetic structure seems to be the predisposition to develop certain kinds of perception,
ideation or action. The actual perceptions, ideas and actions are influenced by personal experience and cultural
circumstances.
The evolutionary
perspective.
The evolutionary perspective Stevens presents
provides an interesting view of the role that archetypal symbols have performed
in terms of human adaption to the needs history poses
upon him. Symbol formation seems to promote our grasp on reality. It provides a
powerful means of communication, a way of expressing our preoccupations and
concerns through space and time. Symbolism is, in this view, the most
fundamental and most ancient means of communication available to mankind. Symbolism is a language that transcends race,
geography and indeed time. It is the natural Esperanto of humanity. In Steven’s
evolutionary perspective symbols have helped humankind
to survive and evolve.
Stevens proposes we use his book to further our
intuitive understanding of the symbols we encounter in our dreams and
day-to-day lives. He invites us to explore our symbols to reveal their
psychodynamic functioning and look at their effects on our experience of life.
Stevens explores the nature of the relationship
between a symbol and what it represents. Only the
personal determinants of a symbol come from the biography of its originator.
The cultural and phylogenetic determinants find their
sources in the evolutionary history of our species, accessible through myths,
folklore, religions and for instance the arts. We could say that all the events
of each of our personal journeys find their symbolic basis within the grander
transpersonal context of the human species, within the archetypal patterns of
typical human existence.
Joseph Campbell[6]
presents a similar vision; he saw symbols as the product of the interaction between
phylogenetically prepared propensities and personal
experiences.
Extensive research points to the fact that all
cultures display a large number of traits which are
diagnostic of a specific human nature. No human culture is
known without laws about for instance the ownership of property, or
rules for the performance of funeral rites, or certain religious
regulations.
The function of symbols?
According to Jung, all archetypal symbols are
natural because they originate from deep structures in the human psyche, the
collective unconscious. Mircea Eliade
interprets symbols religiously, in terms of how human consciousness evolved
through its relationship with the Sacred. We can try to combine these two
notions to grasp the importance of symbology Stevens is
emphasizing.
A symbol is experienced as numinous if it refers to
something tremendous and is perceived as sacred in the sense that is relates to
something infinitely greater than oneself. Numinosity
coincides with an awareness that behind our personal intelligence a deeper
intelligence is at work which guides, nourishes, and
informs our daily existence.
Jung explained numinosity
in terms of the psychodynamics of what he calls the Self – the nucleus at the
core of the personality which incorporates the entire
archetypal potential of the collective unconscious. The inner connection we -
our personal, “little selfs” - make to the Sacred -
this divine Self which represents the sum-total of all archetypal patterns - is
then also our connection to being itself, to life. The Self is the living embodiment in
each and every one of us of the numinous power that has always and everywhere
been attributed to “God”.
The archetypes thus become sacred – as do the
symbols representing them.
It is indeed interesting to see the connection
between religion and symbols, symbols and religion. When we agree with Stevens
that the symbolic value of any symbol is derived from
the thoughts and emotions it evokes in us, giving it an increased weight of
meaning, it is not such a big step to see the meaning of symbols in the
religious traditions of humanity.
Walter Burkert[7]
argues that “a religion is a system of symbols
incorporating ideas and beliefs which are emphatically accepted as true even
though they cannot be verified empirically”. He explores the possibility of
natural religion as typical for the human species: “a religious sense and practice
naturally proceeding from biological imperatives”. These biological imperatives
include the forming of groups to secure the survival of individual members. In
order to guarantee the cohesion of a successful group, mythic-religious
contexts with rituals, rules and sanctions evolved. Communication became a
necessity.
Communication between animals is originally iconic in
the sense that an animal will imitate the action that is
intended or the object that is desired. Language originated by the ritualization of movements, accompanied by the use of the
mouth and tongue to make primitive sounds of increasing complexity and significance.
These sounds were originally iconic, but with time, signs and words emerged
which lost their mimetic component and became progressively ritualized into
more sophisticated forms of gesticulation and speech.
Much of our behavior is linked with biologically
motivated states[8] which have become ritualized into symbolic vehicles of
communication. The human capacity to create symbols and words, and our ability
to communicate by means of them, developed through the rapid evolution of the
human brain as a result of increased selection
pressures coming from a largely hostile environment.
In Steven’s vision all our
archetypal patterns of thought, feeling, symbolism and behavior are present and
expressed in us because of the contribution they made to the fitness of past
generations. Behavior that proved useless did not evolve into a pattern. The
symbol-forming psyche always had it’s reasons,
archetypal reasons, that originally and au fond were biological and adaptive.
Only now that we lost touch with these original reasons, we mostly experience
the consequences; the symbols in our dreams, stories
and day-to-day lives, as spiritual, emotional and intuitive.
Symbols and words are both sensory expressions of
consciousness, made visible and audible in images and sounds. Symbols play an
important role however, especially in relation to archetypal patterns. Being
imagistic rather than verbal, they are more directly linked
to their deeper structures (archetypes) than are words. Furthermore symbols can combine many
disparate elements into a unitary expression, they can tolerate paradox or
combine contradictory ideas without loosing their expressive power.
We also use symbols to connote concepts. We must
realize that this ability is an extremely important tool humans have developed.
Once we formed a concept of a thing or a process, the object of our thinking no
longer needs to be present. We can reflect on it, play with it in our
imagination, in its absence. Also, we can relate one
concept to another and create new concepts (and, when we can realize them, new
actual objects). Symbols thus have an adaptive function, they help us
understand and master our reality. They also enable us to perceive something
entirely new, to create something that was not actually there before[9].
Steven mentions human dreaming and the symbols each
of us spontaneously, involuntarily generate every night of our lives. In his view symbols are instruments of mental health: “one of their
most important contributions is to correct deficient modes of psychological
functioning”. He insists on therapeutic analytical dream-work to enhance the
“potentially enormous transformative power” of dreams.
Could it be that in dreams we retain parts of the
contents of our consciousness “lost” to us because a great deal of our
“conscious processing” of sensory input is no longer symbolic? Could we
conclude that, during dreaming, we process data in another mode than
during waking states[10]?
Hypnosis uses this different, alternate mode to
detach a client from rational, verbal inner communication and connect to
“deeper” layers of consciousness by means of imagery and symbols. Interesting!
The
evolution of meaning.
Semeiosis,
communication through signs and symbols, is one of the earliest propensities to
have evolved. That the characteristic human images and configurations were
based on archetypes[11]
does seem logical and in accordance with the notion of intuitive psychology and
biology we saw earlier.
From animal studies we know
that an archetypal image or pattern of behavior, once it has evolved as a
characteristic of a given species, seems to breed true as long as the species
exists. It does not seem to disappear with disuse.
The moment the appropriate stimulus is encountered in the environment, the archetype is activated,
with its related patterns of behavior and emotions. These patterns need not be
consciously present; there seems to be a central mechanism that “knows” them.
The image, behavior and emotions appear to be constellated
round an archetypal core that exists in the innate predisposition in the
central nervous system of the species.
Now we come back to Jung and realize he was among
the first to consider that such innate predispositions could actually exist in
human beings. John Bowlby[12],
a developmental psychologist from
Assuming that symbolizing indeed involves an innate
ability to perceive, recognize and process specific archetypal patterns, some
added cognitive process must be at work to appreciate the significance of the
stimuli; their meaning. Only if a
stimulus from the environment is perceived and recognized as a stimulus for a
certain archetypal pattern of response, it accesses and/or activates the
underlying programming. This stimulus-archetype interaction appears to work
much like a password that needs to be received and
classified by a computer program to start it up. Another metaphor that comes to
mind is the matrix from the movie. The running numbers and signs on the screen
are chaotic, they don’t seem to have any meaning until
the operator recognize patterns that allow him to “see” through the codes. Then
he perceives a different dimension of reality and becomes able to respond to
it.
What Stevens, following Jung, appears to introduce
here is a new concept of a “programmed-by-evolution” consciousness innate in
humans.
While Gerald Edelman[13]
argues that animals,
humans included, are always seeking to impose meaning on events,
it seems that Stevens is describing the symbol-making process as the other way
around. Only when an event or an object is recognized as a stimulus, it obtains
it’s “increased weight of meaning” and thus it’s
symbol-status. An object that is perceived as a
stimulus, a trigger of an archetypal, programmed response, evokes thoughts and
emotions. Only then it has meaning. The stimulus
becomes a symbol to us when it is linked to and
activates an archetypal pattern.
In this vision symbols form
the keys to the archetypes. No wonder that symbolism and
religion are so closely connected. When we consider the numinous/sacred
sense archetypes evoke, we can see how the symbols triggering them, do indeed
seem to connect us to the Divine.
According to Anthony Stevens
the symbolic systems on which consciousness is based are constructed out of
meanings. Meaning thus seems a fundamental concept in our biology, something
nature cannot do without. Stevens writes:
“…the capacity to create and respond appropriately to signs and symbols is
indispensable to the apperception of meaningfulness. … an
image becomes a symbol precisely when it is endowed with meaning….”. Maybe this
is why visionaries as Jung and Campbell believed that humans need myths to live
by.
[1] the word symbol derives from the
Greek symbolon
= sym (together) and ballein (to throw)
[2] Steven Mithen,
The Prehistory of Mind, 1996
[3] http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/freud.htm
[4] Piaget’s researches in developmental
psychology and genetic epistemology had one unique focus: how does knowledge grow?
His answer is that the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of
logically embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion
of lower less powerful logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to
adulthood. Therefore, children's logic and modes of thinking are initially
entirely different from those of adults (http://www.piaget.org/biography/biog.html)
[5] Anthony Steven’s
co-author in the book Evolutionary Psychiatry (1996)
[6] Joseph Campbell, The Heroes Journey,
1990 – see my TS561-LMIII
[7] Walter Burkert,
Creation of the Sacred, tracks of biology in early religions, 1996
[8] Kissing for example is thought to be
ritualized feeding behavior, the laying of hands as an
act of consecration is probably ritualized grooming behavior…
[9] I wondered about the part in “What
the Bleep” where the authors claim one cannot see what one does not know: the
Indians did not see the boats. Psychologists say the same about projections
really. I think we are able to see new things. A child also sees many things
for the first time. Maybe WtB means that we are
limited in our way of looking, depending our perspective. Like it takes a while
to see a holographic picture; once you saw it you can
find it again. For me this seems more about a different mode of perceiving than
about not knowing the object we seek to perceive.
[10] a short overview of
brainwave-frequencies to illustrate that brain activity correlates with
wake/dream/deep sleep states - http://www.transparentcorp.com/products/np/brainwaves.php
[11] Stevens
defines archetypes as genome-bound units of information which program the
individual member of a species to perceive, respond, and behave in ways which are adapted to the circumstances prevailing in
the environment at any given time.
[12] John Bowlby
(1907-1986), The nature of a child’s tie to his
mother, 1958. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39: 350-373
[13] Gerald Edelman, The remembered
Present, 1989 – won the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1972