Quick Answer
The book Jung knew would cost him Freud, and did. Published in 1912 as a study of one stranger's daydreams, it argued that libido is general energy rather than sex, that the unconscious produces myths without being taught them, and that the hero's descent into the dragon's belly is the ego's descent into the mother-unconscious, from which it returns reborn or not at all. Jung rewrote it in 1952 with the concepts he had built in the meantime. It is his hardest book to read and the one in which every later idea appears for the first time, and the pattern Campbell would later call the monomyth is here before him.
Key Takeaways
- Libido as energy, not sexuality: the break with Freud in one concept.
- Miss Miller: a stranger's fantasies read as a hero myth in progress.
- The dual mother: the unconscious as source and as devourer.
- The night sea crossing: the sun's descent as the ego's.
- The sacrifice: giving up the child to be born twice.
18 min read
What This Book Is
Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia is volume 5 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, published in English in 1956 in R. F. C. Hull's translation. It is the fourth, revised edition of a book Jung first published in two parts in 1911 and 1912 as Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, in the yearbook of the psychoanalytic movement that Freud had made him editor of. It runs to around five hundred pages in the Princeton edition, with the Miller fantasies printed as an appendix.
The book is, on its face, a commentary on a short document: the waking fantasies, poems and dream-like narratives of a young American woman published in 1906 by the Geneva psychologist Théodore Flournoy under the title "Some Instances of Subconscious Creative Imagination." Jung never met her. He took her material as a specimen of what the unconscious produces when left to itself, and he read it, image by image, against the mythologies of the world, to show that a modern individual's fantasies follow the same pattern as the hero myths and that the pattern is the transformation of psychic energy.
On its real face it is the book in which Jung stopped being Freud's heir and became himself, and everything he later called analytical psychology is in it in embryo.
The subtitle. The prelude to a case of schizophrenia is the 1952 subtitle, added after Jung learned that Miss Miller had been hospitalised. In 1912 he did not know this. The claim that her fantasies were prodromal, the early signs of a psychosis, was a retrospective judgment, and readers should weigh it as such. The 1912 book presented her as a normal, if imaginative, young woman.
The Two Editions
The reader has a choice, and it matters.
The 1912 text, translated by Beatrice Hinkle in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious, is the book as it was written: by a man of thirty-six, still Freud's president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, working out in public why he could no longer accept his master's theory. It is polemical, disorganised, dense with quotation, and alive. It has no archetypes, no self, no individuation, since those words did not yet exist in Jung's vocabulary; it has libido, the mother, the hero and the sacrifice.
The 1952 revision, which is the Collected Works text, is by a man of seventy-seven who had built the whole system and went back to install it in the foundation. The concepts are named. The polemic is softened. The Miller material is treated more clinically. About a third of the text is new. Jung wrote in the foreword that the book had been the work of a young man and that he had left its faults where he could, but the revision changes the book's character and readers who want the original event should read Hinkle.
This review is of the 1952 text, since it is what the book now is, with the 1912 version noted where the difference matters.
Miss Miller
The stranger at the centre.
Frank Miller was a young woman from Alabama who had travelled in Europe, attended Flournoy's lectures in Geneva, and sent him a record of her spontaneous fantasies with her own commentary. Flournoy published them as an example of subconscious creativity that could be traced to forgotten impressions. The material is slight: a poem to God written on a ship, a second poem about a moth longing for the sun, and a long waking fantasy about an Aztec hero named Chiwantopel who declares his love for an unknown woman, is nearly assassinated, and dies with his horse when a serpent bites them.
Jung reads the sequence as a drama of libido. The hymn to God is the ego turning from an erotic impression to a religious sublimation. The moth and the sun is the longing for the source, which is the mother. Chiwantopel is the hero, the personified libido, who must find the woman who understands him, fails, and returns to the mother in death. He argues that the fantasies show a young woman's psyche being drawn back toward the unconscious rather than forward into life, and that this regression, if not resolved, would end in illness. In 1952, knowing that it had, he reinforced the reading.
The interpretation of a person one has never met from a pamphlet is a method nobody would defend now, and Jung himself later regretted the case's thinness. The reader should treat Miss Miller as the occasion rather than the subject. The subject is the pattern.
Two Kinds of Thinking
The opening chapter, and the most accessible.
Jung distinguishes directed thinking, which is verbal, logical, adapted to reality and tiring, from fantasy thinking, which is imagistic, associative, undirected and takes no effort, the thinking of dreams, of children, of myth and of the ancients. He argues that fantasy thinking is older than directed thinking rather than a degraded form of it, that it produces the same images in every culture because it works from the same inherited dispositions, and that its products, myths, are expressions of the psyche's own processes projected on nature rather than explanations of nature.
The chapter is where the collective unconscious is first stated, though not yet named: the claim that individual fantasy draws on a common inheritance of images and that a modern person's daydream may repeat a myth they have never read. Everything in the book follows from this.
The Concept of Libido
The chapter that broke the friendship.
Freud's libido was sexual energy, and the neuroses were its disturbances. Jung, working with schizophrenic patients at the Burghölzli, had found that their withdrawal from reality involved a withdrawal of all interest, sexual interest among it, and that a purely sexual libido could not explain it. He proposed that libido be understood as psychic energy in general, undifferentiated, capable of taking sexual, nutritive, aggressive or spiritual forms, and that its transformations from one form to another were the subject of psychology. Sexuality was one channel; religion, art and culture were others; and the movement of energy between them was the real drama.
The wider definition let Jung read the mother in myth as the source of energy rather than as a sexual object, incest as the desire to return to the source rather than as literal desire for the parent, and the hero's struggle as the struggle to free energy from regression rather than to repress a wish. It also removed the sexual foundation on which Freud had built, and Freud said so.
The Break With Freud
Brief, since the book is not about it, but the reader should have the facts.
Jung told Freud in 1911 that the second part of the book would cost him Freud's friendship. Freud read it, wrote that he had recognised the breach, and the correspondence declined through 1912 into the letter of January 1913 in which he proposed they abandon personal relations. Jung resigned as editor of the yearbook in 1913 and as president of the Association in 1914. He then entered the period of disorientation and inner work that the Red Book records.
The book was, in this sense, a declaration written in the form of a case study, and its heat, especially in the 1912 text, is the heat of a man cutting himself free. Jung's later account in Memories, Dreams, Reflections confirms that he knew what he was doing.
The Hymn of Creation
The first of Miss Miller's productions and Jung's first amplification.
On a night voyage she had been moved by a sailor's singing and wrote, in a half-sleep, a hymn to the Creator. Jung traces the hymn's images, the God who made sound and light, through Genesis, the Egyptian creation by the word, the Logos, the Vedic hymns, and the Naassene and Orphic traditions, and argues that the young woman's erotic impression had been transformed, without her knowledge, into a religious image whose form was given by a pattern older than she was. The impression was hers; the hymn was the psyche's.
The chapter is the method in miniature: a personal fragment, a mythological parallel, and the claim that the parallel was produced, never learned. It is also where a reader first meets the book's difficulty, since the parallels multiply until the fragment is lost in them.
The Song of the Moth
The second poem, and the first appearance of the sun.
Miss Miller's moth longs for the sun and will die in its light. Jung reads the sun as the libido's own image, the source of life and warmth that the psyche projects as the highest good, and the moth's longing as the ego's longing for the source that will consume it. He amplifies through Mithraic sun-worship, the Egyptian Ra, Faust's Easter walk, and the mystics' longing for God, and argues that the poem records a dangerous turn: the young woman's energy is flowing back toward an image of the source rather than out into the world, and the death the moth desires is the regression the book will trace.
The chapter introduces the sun as the book's master symbol. The hero will be the sun, its night passage through the sea will be the setting and rising, and the sacrifice will be the sun's own.
The Origin of the Hero
The turn to Chiwantopel, and the book's central idea.
Jung reads the hero of Miss Miller's fantasy as the personification of her libido: the energy of the psyche imagined as a figure who acts. The hero's task, in every myth, is the same: to leave the mother, descend into danger, overcome the monster and return with the treasure, which is renewed life. He traces the pattern through Gilgamesh, Hiawatha, Siegfried and the sun gods, and he argues that the story, whatever it says about ancient kings, is about the ego's relation to the unconscious, which every person must enact in leaving childhood and in every later renewal.
The hero as the ego's libido in its struggle with the unconscious is the idea that Campbell would take, forty years later, into The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell's monomyth is this chapter systematised.
Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth
The longest chapter and the heart of the book.
The hero's descent is a return to the mother, and the mother in myth is the unconscious: the water, the sea, the earth, the cave, the tree, the city, the womb from which the ego was born and to which it must return to be reborn. Jung amplifies through the Great Mother cults, the Egyptian Isis, the Christian Church as mother, the water of baptism, the tree of life and the tree of death, and the countless myths in which the hero enters the mother's body and emerges renewed or is held.
The chapter's argument is that the longing for the mother, which Freud read as sexual, is the longing for the source of energy, and that its real danger is dissolution rather than incest: the ego that returns to the unconscious and does not return from it. Rebirth is the successful return, and the images of rebirth, baptism, the second birth, the resurrection, are the images of libido freed from regression and flowing back into life. Jung's later concept of the Great Mother archetype begins here.
The Night Sea Journey
The image the book is remembered for.
The sun sets in the western sea, travels through the underworld at night, and rises in the east. In the myths Jung gathers, the hero is swallowed by a sea monster, a whale, a dragon, at sunset, journeys in its belly through the night, lights a fire inside it or cuts his way out, and emerges at dawn, often having lost his hair from the heat. Jonah, Heracles, Hiawatha, the Polynesian Maui and the Egyptian Ra in the barque of night all do this.
Jung reads this night passage through the sea as the ego's descent into the unconscious in depression, illness, or crisis, the period of darkness in which nothing seems to move, and the emergence as the renewal that comes if the descent is survived. The image has become the standard Jungian figure for the dark period of an analysis or a life, and it is here in its first form, with Frobenius's collection of the whale-dragon myths as its source.
What the book does that no earlier book had done is to read the mythological pattern as a description of an energy process rather than as a story about gods or a disguised wish. The sun sets and rises: that is what energy does when it withdraws from the world into the unconscious and returns. The hero is swallowed and cuts his way out: that is what the ego does when it survives the withdrawal. The mother nourishes and devours: that is what the unconscious is, source and threat at once. Once the pattern is seen as energetic, every myth becomes a map of the same descent and return, and the reader's own dark periods acquire a shape. Whether the map is true is another question; but it is the map most of the century's psychology of the inner life has used.
The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother
The chapter on the fight.
The hero must slay the dragon, and the dragon is the mother in her terrible aspect: the unconscious that will not let the ego go. Jung reads the dragon fights, Siegfried and Fafnir, Marduk and Tiamat, Apollo and Python, as images of the ego's struggle to free its energy from the pull of regression, and he adds the observation, which became central to his psychology, that the hero who slays the dragon is often wounded, blinded or lamed, since the victory over the unconscious costs something and the hero who returns is not the one who left.
He also reads the horse, which Chiwantopel dies with, as the animal libido that carries the hero and that dies when the hero does, and the serpent that kills them both as the mother's final form. The chapter's readings of the dragon as the devouring unconscious have become so standard that readers may not notice they originate here.
The Dual Mother
The chapter Jung himself singled out as the book's centre.
The hero in many myths has two mothers, a natural and a divine, a first birth and a second: Heracles born of Alcmene and suckled by Hera, Moses of his Hebrew mother and Pharaoh's daughter, Christ of Mary and of the Spirit. Jung reads the dual mother as the two aspects of the unconscious, the personal mother from whom the ego is born once, and the collective source from which it must be born again to become itself. The second birth is the achievement of the hero, and the myths of twice-born gods are its record.
Here the 1952 text installs the archetype: the dual mother is an archetypal image, an inherited form that the psyche fills with personal content, and the collective unconscious is the store of such forms. In 1912 the idea was present as the primordial image; forty years later it had its name. The chapter is where a reader sees most clearly what the revision added.
The Sacrifice
The last chapter, and the book's conclusion.
Chiwantopel dies willingly, and Jung reads his death as the sacrifice the hero must make. What is sacrificed is the hero himself: the infantile longing to return to the mother, which is his own regressive libido. The hero gives up the child in himself to be born as an adult, and the myths of the sacrificed god, Mithras slaying the bull that is his own animal nature, Christ on the cross, Odin hanging on the tree, are images of this self-sacrifice through which energy is freed from the past and given to life.
The Mithraic material, which Jung had studied closely, dominates the chapter, and the bull-slaying as the hero's sacrifice of his own libido is one of the book's most striking readings. Jung ends by returning to Miss Miller and observing that her hero's sacrifice was not made by her, that the fantasy shows the psyche performing what the person could not, and that this gap between the fantasy's wisdom and the ego's inability to act on it is the danger.
The Method of Amplification
A word on how the book works, since it is the method's first full display.
Freud's method was free association: from the dream image, follow the dreamer's associations to the personal complex beneath. Jung's method, developed here, is amplification: from the image, gather the parallels in myth, religion and folklore, and let the image's meaning emerge from the field of its collective forms. The book is amplification without limit, and its difficulty is the difficulty of a method in its first enthusiasm, in which every image is followed to every parallel and the argument is buried.
Later Jung learned restraint, and Man and His Symbols shows the method disciplined. Here it is undisciplined, and readers should decide in advance to skim the amplifications and read the connecting argument, returning to the parallels that interest them.
What Came From It
More than from any other single book of Jung's.
The collective unconscious and the archetypes, named later, are argued here. The hero myth as psychology is here, and Campbell, who read the Hinkle translation, built on it. The whale's belly, the devouring mother, the sacrifice of the puer, the second birth are here. Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness is this book made systematic. The whole literature of the inner life, from the Jungians to popular psychology, descends from the reading of Chiwantopel's death.
The book also cost Jung the psychoanalytic movement and gave him, after the breakdown that followed, a psychology of his own. Its historical importance is not in doubt. Its intrinsic merit, as a piece of reasoning, is more mixed, and the reader should hold both.
The Red Book Connection
The book Jung wrote next.
In 1913, with Freud gone and the movement lost, Jung began the confrontation with the unconscious that Liber Novus records: the descent, the figures, the dead, the years of images. He had just finished writing that the hero must go down into the mother and return or be held. He then went down. The Red Book is the descent of the man who had described it in others, and reading the two together is the best commentary on either. Symbols of Transformation says what the unconscious does in myth; the Red Book shows what it did to him.
The Objections
Three, and they are old.
The case is not a case. Miss Miller was a stranger interpreted from a pamphlet, and the diagnosis was retrospective.
The amplification proves nothing. Parallels can be found for any image, and finding them does not show the image was inherited rather than learned.
The revision rewrote the evidence. The 1952 text presents as the young Jung's discoveries concepts the old Jung had built in the meantime.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have read Campbell and want the source, since the monomyth as an inner event begins here, not in 1949.
Read it if you want to understand the Freud-Jung break from the book that caused it, and read the Hinkle translation for the original.
Read it if you know the later Jung, the Two Essays, Aion, the alchemy, and want to see the ideas before they were tidied.
Read chapters one, five, seven and eight if you read nothing else: two kinds of thinking, the origin of the hero, the mother, and the sacrifice. That is the argument; the rest is the field.
The book's lasting insight is that the dark period is the middle of the pattern. The sun sets. The hero is swallowed. Energy withdraws from the world and goes down into the source, and from outside it looks like depression, illness or failure. Jung's claim, drawn from a hundred myths and one young woman's daydream, is that the descent is the necessary condition of the return, that the ego which never goes down is never renewed, and that the staying, rather than the going down, is the danger. He wrote this in 1912 and then spent five years proving it on himself. The reader who is in the belly of the whale will find in this book the assurance that the pattern has a dawn in it, and the warning that the dawn is not automatic.
The book that ended the Freud years and began analytical psychology, with the hero, the mother, the whale's belly and the sacrifice in their first form.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's difficulty and of the problems with the Miller case is given above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Symbols of Transformation about?
The fantasies of a young American woman, published under the name Miss Frank Miller, which Jung reads as a hero myth unfolding in an individual psyche, and which he uses to argue that libido is general psychic energy rather than sexuality and that the unconscious produces mythological images on its own.
Why did it break with Freud?
Because it recast libido as undifferentiated energy that could take sexual, nutritive or spiritual forms, and read incest symbolically as the ego's regression to the mother-unconscious rather than as a literal wish. Freud regarded both as abandoning the foundations of psychoanalysis. The friendship ended within a year of publication.
Who was Miss Miller?
Frank Miller, an American woman who published her waking fantasies and poems in 1906 with a commentary by the Geneva psychologist Théodore Flournoy. Jung never met her and read her material as a document. She was later hospitalised, which Jung took as confirming his reading of the fantasies as prodromal.
What is the 1952 revision?
Jung rewrote the 1912 book, originally Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, forty years later, expanding it by a third, adding the archetype and the self, and removing some of the early polemic. The revised text is what appears as volume 5 of the Collected Works; the 1912 version is available separately as Psychology of the Unconscious.
What is the hero in this book?
The ego's libido personified, which must descend into the unconscious, the mother, the sea, the dragon, and return renewed or be swallowed. Jung reads Miss Miller's hero Chiwantopel, the Hiawatha of Longfellow, Gilgamesh and the sun's passage through the night as the same pattern.
What does it say about the mother?
That the mother in myth is the unconscious itself, the source the ego came from and must return to for renewal, and that the incest the myths dread is the danger of being reabsorbed. The dual mother, terrible and nourishing, is the book's central image and the first form of what Jung later called the archetype.
What is the sacrifice?
The book's final chapter argues that the hero must sacrifice his infantile longing for the mother, his own regressive libido, so as to be born a second time as an adult. Jung reads the Mithraic bull-slaying and the Christian crucifixion as images of this self-sacrifice.
Is it readable?
With difficulty. It is the most densely allusive of Jung's books, moving from Egyptian hymns to Longfellow to Sanskrit within a page, and the argument is buried under the amplification. Readers should know the shape before starting and expect to skim the middle.
Does it hold up?
As a reading of Miss Miller, no; she was a stranger interpreted from a pamphlet. As the origin of the archetype, the collective unconscious and the hero's quest as psychology, yes. Campbell, Neumann and the whole Jungian literature on the hero begin here.
How does it compare to the Red Book?
Jung began the Red Book in 1913, the year after this was published, and the Red Book records his own descent, the one this book had described in other people's myths. Read together, Symbols of Transformation is the theory and the Red Book is the experiment on himself.
What is the best edition?
Collected Works volume 5, Princeton, in the Hull translation, which is the 1952 revision with the Miller fantasies as an appendix. The 1912 text, translated by Beatrice Hinkle in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious, is worth reading for the original argument in its unrevised force.
Who should read it?
Readers of Campbell who want the source of the hero's quest as psychology, students of the Freud-Jung break who want the book that caused it, and anyone who has read the later Jung and wants to see the ideas in their first, rawest form.
Name your night sea journey
Jung's practical gift in this book is a shape for the dark period. If you are in one, or remember one, try setting it against the pattern: the sunset, the swallowing, the time in the belly when nothing moves, the fire lit inside, the cutting out, the dawn with hair singed. Notice which stage you are at and which you have skipped. The myths, Jung argues, are a record rather than a consolation: what the psyche does when it goes down, kept by people who went down before you. The record says the descent has an exit and that the exit is not the same as the entrance. That is worth knowing at three in the morning, and it is what the book, under all its Sanskrit, is for.
Sources & References
- Jung, C. G. Symbols of Transformation, Collected Works vol. 5, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Princeton University Press.
- Jung, C. G. Psychology of the Unconscious, trans. Beatrice Hinkle, 1916, for the 1912 text.
- McGuire, William, ed. The Freud/Jung Letters, 1974.
- Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, 2003.
- Flournoy, Théodore. "Quelques faits d'imagination créatrice subconsciente," Archives de psychologie 5, 1906.
- Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949, for the systematisation.