The Pelican in ALCHEMY
In medieval and alchemical tradition, the pelican is a symbol of the soul, giving of its own essence in order to bring forth new life. The blood flowing toward the chicks represents the life giving force, the inner transformation through which human beings transcend their selfish nature and ascend to a higher, spiritual state of existence.
What does that mean in JUNGIAN psychology?
The self-inflicting loss of energy (blood) represents the lowering of the auxiliary cognitive function. People generally develop only one cognitive function and a lesser developed auxiliary function. The other two are undifferentiated from the unconscious. When one lowers the use of his auxiliary cognitive function, its opposite will automatically rise from the unconscious. This is exactly what happened to Jung when facing his depression from 1912 onwards. After having exhausting all techniques relative to his auxiliary Thinking function, he begun to focus on his Feeling function with active imagination. The momentarily lowering of his auxiliary function brought forth his tertiary Feeling function. He worked on that new function until the mid-1920s.
In 1915, he started to work on his Red Book, a work whose primary goal was to develop his inferior Sensation function. The illustrations and the gothic script is undeniably a Sensation task which Jung perdues until 1928.
This process of developing new cognitive functions is exactly what Jung found in alchemy which has been his major interest for the last 30 years of his life.
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To learn more, please refer to my book
The KEY to Understand C. G. Jung,
available HERE on AMAZON.
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