WHEN THE SOUL SEEKS SYMBOLS, Francesca Zaza

The Limit of Reason before Extreme Experience

There are moments in existence in which rational thought, while retaining its ordering and interpretive function, proves insufficient to contain the excess of lived experience, especially when the individual is confronted with pain, loss, illness, or the concrete possibility of death: events that interrupt the continuity of everyday life and open a liminal space in which ordinary categories of meaning appear suspended, allowing radical questions to emerge concerning why what happens happens, what meaning may be attributed to what one is living through, and whether, beyond suffering itself, there exists a further possibility of understanding, transformation, or reconciliation with limitation.

In such moments, the human being seems spontaneously to turn toward the language of symbol, since images, figures, narratives, and inner presences emerge with a force that exceeds discursive logic and reveal a dimension of the psyche that cannot be reduced to a merely cognitive function, but is capable of producing, receiving, and organizing profound meanings. The symbol appears precisely when the concept is no longer sufficient, that is, when experience asks to be contained not only through causal explanations, but through forms capable of giving body, face, and direction to what would otherwise remain formless. It is within this space that analytical psychology, archetypal psychology, and theological reflection may meet, insofar as they conceive the psyche not as a closed, self-referential, and merely adaptive system, but as a structure open to the symbolic, capable of receiving contents arising from the deepest levels of personal, collective, and spiritual experience (Jung, 1959/1969; Hillman, 1975; Rahner, 1978).

It is not uncommon that, during states of intense inwardness, in prayer, dreams, meditation, or moments of particular vulnerability, unexpected images may emerge, such as saints, religious figures, symbolic animals, words, names, or scenes that do not belong to the immediate repertoire of ordinary consciousness. A strictly rationalist reading might reduce such phenomena to mere unconscious associations, cultural residues, or accidental products of imagination; however, the archetypal perspective invites us to consider a more complex possibility, namely that the psyche is structurally predisposed to relate to collective symbolic forms capable of mediating, organizing, and transforming the meaning of experience, especially when the ego is exposed to a crisis that exceeds its ordinary capacities for control (Jung, 1938/1969; Jung, 1961/1989).

The Psyche as a Symbolic Organ

In Carl Gustav Jung’s thought, the psyche does not produce symbols arbitrarily, nor does it generate them as mere imaginative ornaments, but is traversed by deep structures, the archetypes, which organize the universal experience of the human and appear not as fixed and determinate images, but as matrices of meaning that take shape through myths, religions, dreams, collective narratives, and historically situated symbolic configurations (Jung, 1959/1969). From this perspective, the archetype is not the figurative content itself, but the dynamic structure that makes possible the emergence of certain images, which assume concrete form within a culture, a biography, and an existential situation.

Within a Christian-Catholic cultural context, such structures may be embodied in the figures of the saints, who do not constitute merely external religious references belonging to devotional or hagiographic tradition, but may also become psychic images capable of representing specific modes of passing through existence: martyrdom, loss, healing, transformation, contemplation, inner struggle, renunciation, fidelity, or descent into pain. In this sense, the sacred figure is not reducible to a simple object of worship, but may be understood as a symbolic form through which the psyche articulates the relationship between individual suffering, collective memory, and the possibility of spiritual orientation.

In moments of crisis, the psyche may activate symbolic images that are coherent with the conflict being lived, not necessarily as signs of a supernatural event in the strict sense, but as expressions of the symbolic function attempting to confer order and intelligibility upon experience, because the mind is not only a producer of thoughts, but also a receiver of meaningful images. Jung repeatedly emphasized the transformative character of the symbol, distinguishing it from simple allegory: the symbol does not translate a content already known, but opens a field of meaning still to be understood, within which consciousness is called to an interpretive and transformative task (Jung, 1959/1969).

It is therefore essential to distinguish the symbol from the mere sign. The sign conventionally refers to a determinate and relatively stable content, whereas the symbol always exceeds its immediate meaning, since it opens a plurality of interpretations and an experiential depth that cannot be fully exhausted by conceptual language. In this sense, Paul Ricoeur’s well-known assertion that “the symbol gives rise to thought” precisely indicates the capacity of the symbolic not to close meaning, but to disclose it, making possible a hermeneutics of existence in which understanding arises not from the elimination of ambiguity, but from its responsible traversal (Ricoeur, 1960/1967).

Imagination, Symbolic Field, and Numinous Experience

Post-Jungian currents have further expanded this perspective by shifting attention from the structure of the archetype to the autonomous life of images and to the imaginal function of the psyche. James Hillman, in particular, proposes a vision in which the individual is not conceived as the sovereign origin of symbols, but as part of a field of images and meanings that precedes, traverses, and addresses the person, asking to be listened to rather than immediately explained (Hillman, 1975).

Unlike classical Jungian thought, which is more strongly oriented toward the integration of the Self and the structural dimension of the archetype, Hillman privileges psychic plurality, the autonomy of the image, and the value of imagination as an original mode of human experience. Imagination is not interpreted as a function subordinated to rationality or as a mere fantasy-production of the ego, but as a primary place in which psychic reality manifests itself according to its own forms, often closer to myth, poetry, and religion than to logical-causal explanation (Hillman, 1975, 2013).

The metaphor of the mind as an “antenna,” although not belonging in a technical sense to classical Jungian theory, effectively conveys the experience reported by many people in spiritual, creative, or particularly receptive states, namely the perception that certain images are not simply manufactured by the ego, but arrive “from elsewhere,” imposing themselves with a force of alterity that surprises consciousness. This metaphor must, however, be understood in a phenomenological rather than ontological sense: it describes a subjective experience of provenance, intensity, and otherness, without constituting in itself metaphysical proof of the existence of a transcendent reality.

In psychological terms, this “elsewhere” may be interpreted as the collective unconscious, cultural memory, a shared archetypal dimension, or numinous experience, depending on the theoretical framework adopted. Jung, drawing on Rudolf Otto’s vocabulary, uses the concept of the numinous to indicate that which appears radically other than the ego, charged with emotional intensity, symbolic power, and transformative possibility (Otto, 1917/1958; Jung, 1938/1969). The numinous cannot be reduced to rational explanation, but interrupts the continuity of ordinary consciousness, introducing a sense of call, fear, fascination, disturbance, or revelation.

When a figure emerges during prayer, dream, or meditation, it may be interpreted as the psyche’s attempt to construct a bridge between subjective experience and universal symbolic structure, between individual biography and the collective heritage of images. From this perspective, the image should not be dismissed as illusion, but neither should it be naively assumed as immediate revelation: rather, it calls for discernment, interpretation, and listening, since its value lies not only in its origin, but in the transformation it produces within consciousness.

Sacred Figures and Existential Orientation

In Christianity, the saints represent embodied models for passing through human suffering, since they do not eliminate suffering, deny it, or magically resolve it, but inhabit it, offering narratively, ethically, and spiritually structured forms of relationship with it. The saint, in Christian tradition, is not simply a moral hero or an exemplary character, but one who transforms one’s wound, trial, or radical exposure to limitation into a testimony of meaning.

It is significant that, in moments of crisis, figures often emerge that are symbolically coherent with the individual’s lived experience. Saint Eustace, for example, is traditionally associated with sudden loss, radical trial, and inner fidelity amid the collapse of certainties, whereas Saint Jerome embodies the archetype of the ascetic intellectual, oriented toward the search for meaning through study, withdrawal, translation, and the transformation of experience into word. Such figures may become, on a symbolic level, images of orientation for a consciousness seeking to understand itself through forms already present within religious and cultural memory.

From an archetypal point of view, these images may be understood as orienting or compensatory forms that emerge in relation to specific psychic states and allow consciousness to access a configuration of meaning broader than its immediate condition. To reduce their appearance to mere chance would impoverish the complexity of symbolic experience; at the same time, a naively supernaturalistic reading would risk neglecting the psychic, cultural, and imaginative mediation through which such contents manifest themselves. It is precisely in the tension between these two poles, psychological reductionism and supernatural immediatism, that a fertile interpretive space opens.

Within this space, the sacred figure may be considered a place of convergence between collective memory, religious experience, and psychic dynamics. Mircea Eliade showed that, across cultures, the sacred does not manifest itself as a simple abstract idea, but through forms, places, images, and narratives that make the world inhabitable and oriented (Eliade, 1957/1959). In an analogous way, the image of the saint may function as a temporary symbolic center, capable of offering consciousness a language through which to pass through the disorder of experience.

Psychology and Theology: between Discernment and Openness

Christian tradition recognizes the possibility that the divine may express itself through images, intuitions, inner movements, and symbolic forms, but at the same time calls for careful discernment, since not every psychic content can be considered revelation, nor can every emotional intensity be identified with authentic spiritual experience. Christian spirituality distinguishes among imagination, suggestion, consolation, illusion, and authentic movement of the spirit, insisting on the need to inwardly test what emerges within consciousness.

In mystical and ascetic tradition, figures such as Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila emphasized the importance of discerning inner images, recognizing the possibility of autosuggestion, spiritual illusion, and confusion between subjective desire and authentic calling. This caution does not diminish the value of symbolic experience, but protects it from every naive, automatic, or narcissistic use, recalling that the inner image must be assessed not only by its intensity, but by the fruits it produces: greater truth, freedom, charity, responsibility, and integration.

Nevertheless, this distinction does not imply a clear and impermeable separation between psyche and transcendence. Contemporary theologians, including Karl Rahner, have emphasized that the human being is structurally open to Mystery, since the religious dimension would not represent an external or accidental addition to consciousness, but a possibility inscribed within the very transcendental constitution of the human person (Rahner, 1978). From this perspective, the psyche would not be merely the place of drives, conflicts, and inner representations, but also the space in which the human being may perceive an original openness to that which exceeds the self.

From this point of view, the spontaneous emergence of symbolic images may be read as the soul’s attempt to articulate profound questions through the symbolic language available to it. The content varies according to cultural context, taking the form of saints, gods, ancestors, animals, sacred places, or mythical figures, but the function remains: to transform chaotic experience into a meaningful narrative, offering consciousness a form through which pain may be not merely endured, but thought, prayed, narrated, and at least partially integrated.

The Symbol as a Therapeutic Function

Contemporary psychology increasingly recognizes that suffering is not connected only to pain as such, but also to the loss of meaning that may accompany it. When experience does not find a symbolic location, when it cannot be narrated, thought, or inscribed within a meaningful framework, fragmentation, anxiety, disorientation, and a sense of emptiness emerge. From this perspective, trauma concerns not only what happens, but also the impossibility of placing what happens within a livable narrative continuity.

Viktor Frankl observed that suffering becomes particularly disintegrating when it can no longer be inserted into a horizon of meaning, since the search for meaning constitutes a fundamental dimension of human existence and of the very possibility of passing through pain without being annihilated by it (Frankl, 1969). His logotherapeutic perspective shows that the human being does not seek only pleasure, adaptation, or the reduction of tension, but also meaning, direction, and the possibility of responding responsibly to the conditions of one’s life.

Within this framework, the symbol does not eliminate pain, but makes it thinkable. Religious images, dreams, archetypal figures, and spiritual narratives may assume a profoundly therapeutic function, not because they replace psychological, medical, or relational care, but because they allow the psyche to re-establish narrative continuity even in moments of existential rupture. The symbol creates a bridge between what has happened and what may still be understood, between the wound and the possibility of form, between the chaos of experience and the beginning of inner transformation.

The question — why precisely these images? — perhaps does not require a definitive answer, since its value lies in opening a space of listening, reflection, and inner connection. It is not always necessary to determine whether an image comes from the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, cultural memory, or a broader spiritual dimension; sometimes it is more important to ask what it makes possible, what word it introduces, what wound it illuminates, and what transformation it fosters.

Ultimately, the human being has always sought symbols in order to orient itself within the mystery of existence, especially when extreme experience renders rational explanation alone insufficient. The search for meaning does not necessarily coincide with the attainment of absolute truths, but with the capacity to recognize, listen to, and inhabit the images that emerge when the soul attempts to enter into dialogue with what transcends it. In this sense, depth psychology and theology do not exclude one another, but may meet in the recognition of an essential anthropological truth: the human being does not live by concepts alone, but by symbols, and in symbols often seeks, even without knowing it, a possible form of salvation, reconciliation, and return to meaning.

ESSENTIAL REFERENCES

Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Harcourt. (Original work published 1957)

Frankl, V. E. (1969). The will to meaning: Foundations and applications of logotherapy. World Publishing.

Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. Harper & Row.

Hillman, J. (1996). The soul’s code: In search of character and calling. Random House.

Hillman, J. (2013). Alchemical psychology. Uniform Edition.

Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and religion: West and East (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1938)

Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1954)

Jung, C. G. (1989). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. Winston & C. Winston, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1961)

Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational (J. W. Harvey, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1917)

Rahner, K. (1978). Foundations of Christian faith: An introduction to the idea of Christianity (W. V. Dych, Trans.). Seabury Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1967). The symbolism of evil (E. Buchanan, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1960)