On symbols, and what to do with them.

In 2024 Richard Dawkins sat across from Jordan Peterson and, after an hour of dragons and serpents and what the Cain and Abel story really means, told him he was drunk on symbols.

I think it is one of the best lines anyone has said about the therapy world in fifty years, and Dawkins wasn't even talking about therapy.

He was talking about a habit. You see a snake in a story and it is not a snake, it is the serpent, it is chaos, it is the predator that has stalked mammals for sixty million years, it is the enemy in the garden. Every image is a door into every other image. Nothing is allowed to just be what it is. Peterson does this with Pinocchio, with the Lion King, with Genesis, with a dragon on a children's book cover, and he does it brilliantly, which is the problem. Brilliance at reading symbols is not evidence that the reading is true. It is evidence that the reader is fluent.

And that is the therapy world. Drunk on symbols. Drunk on meaning. Drunk on interpretation. The client brings an image and the practitioner tells them what it is. The client brings a dream and the practitioner tells them what it wants. The client brings a feeling and the practitioner gives it a name, a source, a story, an archetype, and the client goes home carrying the practitioner's mind on top of their own.

Here is what that does. Either it validates the client's existing model of the world, in which case nothing has changed and everyone feels understood, or it installs the practitioner's learned symbolic lexicon in place of the client's, in which case something has changed, and it isn't the problem.

I work with symbols all day. My whole method runs on them. So this is not an argument against symbols. It is an argument about what a symbol is, and what you do when one turns up.

In subconscious narrative work a symbol is a personal, subjective representation of a problem. It belongs to one person. Their unconscious made it, out of their own experience, the way an artist makes a picture out of the paints and brushes and pencils they happen to have. The same unconscious is capable of unfolding that symbol as a narrative, scene after scene, to a resolution. And the meaning of what it represented is understood by the client, after the session, when the change has already happened.

Sometimes the practitioner will have an intuition about what a symbol is. Sometimes the intuition is even right. It is still dangerous territory, because sometimes it is wrong, and the moment you act on it you have put your picture in front of theirs.

The world is full of symbols and of human beings trying to make sense of them. Oracles, scripture, dream dictionaries, tarot, the whole industry of meaning. Do a rudimentary search on any basic symbol, a crown, a snake, a gate, and you will find untold different interpretations, most of them contradicting each other, all of them confident. So who is to say which one is true? The lineage? I don't think so. The only person who knows what this snake is, is the person whose unconscious painted it, and even they don't know yet.

The drunk reads it. The sober practitioner asks what needs to happen next, and then does one of the hardest things in therapy, which is to observe and facilitate rather than give meaning and involve themselves. The symbol moves. The person watches it move. When it has finished moving, the thing it stood for has changed, and the person finds out what it all meant later, in their own life, in their own words.

Sober on symbols. That's the discipline. Everything else on this site is an explanation of how to stay that way.

Because subconscious narrative work is symbolic, people assume it is Jungian. It isn't. Jung is where the symbolic tradition in therapy starts, so he is the right place to say exactly where this work differs from it.

He found the doorway. He never found the resolution.

In 1913, after the split from Freud, Jung fell into what he himself called a period where he was menaced by a psychosis. Visions, voices, figures arriving in the night. Instead of fleeing the images he turned and faced them, deliberately dropped his level of consciousness, and stepped into what was coming for him. That takes real bravery, and anyone who has done it knows the courage it takes. His courage is not in question.

The sixteen years is the question. He wrote the confrontation into the Red Book and he was still at it a decade and a half later. A method that understood what it was doing would have carried that material to its conclusion. If your process runs for sixteen years, your process may need looking into.

His method simply didn't have a way of finding successful resolution or integration. Yes, the claim is that shadow work integrates the shadow. But if we are honest, he was not able to do that himself, and how many Jungians ever actually achieve it is questionable. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean it as a factual reality. We have to look honestly at these things, especially if we are the therapist doing the work.

Subconscious narrative work is built around the resolution. A symbol is unfolded as a narrative, and a narrative has to go to completion. The work ends when the client's subconscious has got to successful resolution, integration or completion. Not sixteen years. Usually a session.

Was it channelling, or was it change work?

Jung's chief guide inside the Red Book was Philemon, an old man with kingfisher wings who, Jung said, told him things he had not consciously thought. Toward the end, Philemon delivers a set of Gnostic teachings, the Seven Sermons of the Dead. That is not a psychiatrist analysing a projection. That is a man taking transcription from a spirit and publishing it as revelation, closer to a New Age channeller than to anything you could call psychology.

In subconscious narrative work a symbol is never an authority. It is a personal, subjective representation of a problem, made by one person's unconscious out of their own experience, the way an artist makes a picture out of the paints and brushes they happen to have. Nobody transcribes it. Nobody treats it as scripture. It is asked what needs to happen next, and it moves.

He gave séance-content Latin names. We give it nothing.

Jung's mother's family were spiritualists. His grandfather set aside a day each week to talk with his dead first wife. Jung's first piece of scientific work, his 1902 dissertation, was built on séances he ran with his teenage cousin as the medium, channelling his own ancestors. So when you meet the archetypes and the collective unconscious you are not meeting a scientist who occasionally strayed into the mystical. You are meeting a spiritualist who learned to write in the register of science. He took esoteric material and gave it a clinical vocabulary. That is the trick at the centre of his reputation, and it is exactly the trick the New Age teachers run today, which is why he is claimed with equal justice by depth psychologists and tarot readers.

There is nothing esoteric in subconscious narrative work. No collective unconscious, no inherited images, no dictionary of what a snake or a crown or a gate must mean. The symbol belongs to the client, its meaning is known to the client afterwards, and the practitioner's job is to observe and facilitate rather than give meaning and involve themselves.

He was amplified. We are verified in the room.

Jung did not build his movement on results. He built it on two American heiresses. Edith Rockefeller McCormick, treated by him for eight years, paid to found the Zürich Psychological Club and to have his writing translated, and was then set up by him as an analyst herself. Mary Mellon and her husband set up the Bollingen Foundation, which spent around twenty million dollars putting his Collected Works into English and carrying his name into the culture. A meaningful part of Jung the towering authority was purchased. That doesn't make his observations false, but you should be very careful about mistaking scale of influence for weight of evidence.

Subconscious narrative work has no foundation behind it. It is tested one client at a time, and you find out whether it worked in the same session you ran it.

Eight years, or two days.

To become a Jungian analyst you train for around eight years, for around $200,000. To use this method you train for two days, for around $1,000. That is not a boast about the method. It is a statement about where the intelligence sits. Jung put the intelligence in the analyst. We put the intelligence in the client and their extraordinary personal subconscious.

The strongest argument for Jung's archetypes is recurrence. The great mother, the trickster, the serpent, the flood, the dying and rising god: different continents, no contact, same cast. Jung concluded the cast must be inherited. Innate images, carried in the species.

The observation is right. The conclusion is wrong.

Every human being has the same body and the same world. A mother, or the absence of one, in the years we could not survive alone. A sun that leaves and returns. A dark we cannot see in. Snakes, which our nervous systems are primed to learn to fear faster than almost anything. Give a few million people that body and that world and they will build the same associations, without any of them needing to inherit a picture. The mother is enormous because, when the association was laid down, she was. Nobody inherited "up is good"; everybody learned it, because everybody has a spine.

Julian Jaynes gives the bigger version. He argued that until a few thousand years ago the human mind was not conscious as we mean it now: one part issued instructions, the other heard them as the voices of gods, and the private inner life arrived late, with language. You don't have to buy all of Jaynes to take the point. At some stage it is likely that human beings shared a similar kind of unconscious, and so, collectively, interpreted similar experiences in similar ways. That is where the recurrence comes from. Then we developed conscious awareness and language, and each mind became its own place, with its own history and its own lexicon. Some shared experience remains, but reality became far more subjective, and the symbols with it.

What happened next is that very articulate, very intelligent people, Jung chief among them, took the old shared material and built a lexicon out of it, what things should mean, and applied it to modern, individual minds that stopped sharing a dictionary a long time ago. That is a meaning error.

Jung, to be fair to him, half-conceded this. Late in life he said the archetype was a form without content, an empty pattern the culture fills in. He had evolved to a position much closer to subconscious narratives. Unfortunately the world had already bought his earlier work, and it is the earlier work that is still taught. In many ways I am attempting to update him.

Because the rest follows. If the content is learned, the content is the person's own, and the only copy of their dictionary is inside them. So you don't interpret. You ask the only reader there is what happens next.

It is also why the Chinese dragon is a blessing and the European dragon is a plague. Same animal. Different lexicon. Nobody inherited either.

Subconscious Narrative Therapy owes a lot to the work of David Grove. So let's look at who he was, and at where subconscious narrative work differs from his, and where it respects it.

Grove was a New Zealander, Māori, a psychotherapist who spent the 1980s working with trauma survivors and noticed something the field had been talking over for a century. His clients described what was wrong with them in metaphor. "It's like a weight on my chest." "There's a wall." "I'm in a hole." And every time a therapist heard one of those, the therapist did what therapists do: paraphrased it, reflected it back in their own words, interpreted it, or moved on to what they thought the real issue was.

Grove's insight was that the metaphor was the real issue. It was the client's own, precise, unconscious description of the structure of the problem, and every word the therapist added to it contaminated it. So he set out to build a way of asking questions that added nothing. Not his assumptions, not his vocabulary, not his theory, not even his grammar where he could help it.

The result was Clean Language. A small set of questions, built almost entirely from the client's own words. And what kind of weight is that weight? And is there anything else about that wall? And where is that hole? And what would the weight like to have happen? That last one is the whole method in a sentence. You do not ask the client what they want to do about the weight. You ask the weight.

He wrote it up with Basil Panzer in 1989 in Resolving Traumatic Memories: Metaphors and Symbols in Psychotherapy, and then largely got on with the work rather than the marketing, which is why you have probably never heard of him and have certainly heard of people who borrowed from him. Penny Tompkins and James Lawley modelled his work in the 1990s and gave the world Symbolic Modelling and the book Metaphors in Mind, which is where most people meet Clean Language today. Grove himself kept going, into Clean Space and what he called Emergent Knowledge, until he died in 2008.

What I took from him is the principle: keep your meaning out. Where my work differs from his is twofold.

The first difference is the language. Mine is cleaner and more stripped back. Grove's questions still carry a syntax, a rhythm, a way of speaking that a trained ear can hear. My version is simpler, fewer questions, plainer, because the simpler the language, the more the unconscious can be facilitated rather than instructed.

The second difference is the important one. Grove explored the symbolic representation, in the hope that the exploration would lead to a shift or a change. What kind of wall, what's it made of, where is it, is there anything else about it. Explore enough, and something moves. Sometimes it did. My work does not explore the symbol. It unfolds it, as a narrative, and a narrative has to go to some form of completion. The question is never what is this, it is what needs to happen next, asked until the story reaches its end. Exploration can go on for as long as the client is willing. A narrative finishes.

Joseph Campbell was a scholar of comparative mythology. He taught for almost forty years at Sarah Lawrence, a women's college in New York, and wrote the books that most people know him for from there: The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, the four volumes of The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, and at the end of his life the conversations with Bill Moyers that became The Power of Myth.

His claim was that the world's myths share one structure. A person is called out of the ordinary world, crosses a threshold, faces trials, is transformed, and returns with something the ordinary world did not have. He called it the monomyth, the hero's journey, and he believed he had found the core structure of human experience.

Campbell was pretty Jungian. The figures in the stories were archetypes to him, and the journey was the psyche's own. That may or may not be right. It is a beautiful narrative.

The part that matters for subconscious narrative work is what Campbell thought the journey was for. The whole point of it was apotheosis: the moment where the hero is transformed and becomes something more than they were when they set out. Everything before it leads there, and everything after it follows from it.

In subconscious narrative therapy a successful resolution is an apotheotic resolution. The work ends when the client's subconscious has got to a successful resolution, integration or completion, which are other ways of describing an apotheotic experience. It does not stop at understanding, or at relief, or at a shift.

Which is why the work uses a narrative frame, rather than an exploratory frame or an interpretive frame.