What Symbol Lies Within Our Behavior?

By Richard Reeve

Many of our convictions are not as rational as we might think.  In fact, experience seems to show time and time again that as our absolute certainty increases, then our own blind spots likewise increase.  An interesting question to ask relating to all of this is what symbol is trying to express itself amidst any given compulsion, urge or certainty?

“To illustrate: a woman who buys everything she can find in the shape of a butterfly or decorated with butterflies is caught by an urge that calls for symbolic understanding.  In this case, a butterfly may be expressive of her strong inner need to emerge from a confining cocoon, perhaps a cocoon of old protective attitudes.  Or a young man whose unrecognized urge is to exercise great power over people may want to become an analyst and he may be able to give all kinds of exemplary, conscious reasons for wanting to.  If the symbolic nature of his urge – namely to gain power over himself rather than others – is not discovered his influence will be most unfortunate… Or a humanities student may suddenly change his field to regional planning.  His urge to “save” the world, to reorganize and order society, can be understood as if it expressed his own inner need for rescue and for organization. Whether this “choice” of occupation is also valid on the outer plane will be discovered as it is lived.  If it is only symbolic of an unrecognized inner state, it will eventually run into snags in the concrete world.” Edward Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest, Pg. 16.

In our adolescent students, often we catch glimpses of the hero/heroine behind some of the behaviors that are troubling them.  Other times it is the difficult task to separate in a healthy way psychologically from the parents.  Many times students can relate to the commonplace image in recovery circles: ” it’s as if their disease is out in the parking lot doing push ups.”

The value of a Higher Power, strictly from the point of view of the First Step, is that it throws a life line to the individual that recognizes they are horribly confounded by their own behaviors.  The value of defining this reality as a Higher Power is that it allows the symbolic (and here we take the definition of symbolic as “a relatively unknown thing; ibid., pg. 18) to cloth itself in the manner appropriate to the individual.