Carl Jung: A Sentence on the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Politea (Republic)

In the context of a discussion of the reduction-ism of Freud in the relation of Psychology and poetry, Jung comments on the Allegory of the Cave as a symbol:

The true symbol differs essentially from this (a sign or symptom) and should be understood as an expression of an intuitive idea that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way. When Plato, for instance, puts the whole problem of the theory of knowledge in his parable of the cave, or when Christ expresses the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven in parables, these are genuine and true symbols, that is, attempts to express something for which no verbal concept yet exists. If we were to interpret Plato’s metaphor in Freudian terms, we would naturally arrive at the uterus, and would have proved that even a mind like Plato’s was still stuck on a primitive level of infantile sexuality…

The Portable Jung, p. 307

Man is, though, male and female as well as earth and sky because being or the whole is this way, divided between intelligible and visible, earth and sky- which is to say Freud may be correct that the uterus is has something to do with it, but shallow in his understanding of what the uterus is- due to his assumption that the animal appetites are all that is natural to man. The “Uterus ecclesia” (The Portable Jung, p. 63) or womb of the church may also be the womb from which the baptized emerge into the Kingdom. The fundamental two of the whole is the context of the ascent and descent to the causes of the laws and symbols seen in the cave. These are intelligible in light of the study of the soul or man, reflected in the two parts, body and soul or mind- which are more fundamental than the three part division of the soul. The divided line shows at least six distinguishable functions of the mind, and likely, as we say 16 and more. All of these are kinds, but not in the most common sense of the ideas, but more as in Genesis, places where the particular things are, such as in a pool or on the wall, etc. and it is especially in this sense that an emanation and participation approach to the forms makes sense, as the higher are reflected in the lower, and so communicated by analogy.

There is a double Yin Yang symbol: There is a heavenly and earthly feminine and masculine. The archetype is the singular cause involved in the two symbols. Wisdom is the same in Athens and Jerusalem. There is knowledge of the soul in the soul.