Recognising My Own Spiralling Mind (After John Foreman’s Introduction to Jung’s Man and His Symbols)
Reading John Foreman’s introduction to Jung’s Man and His Symbols again, I recognise myself instantly in his description of the Jungian “spiralling.” I realise that I have, for a very long time, been operating inside Jung’s methodology rather than merely reading about it. The spiral is not a technique I adopted — it is the natural form of my inner thinking. It is my living dialogue with the unconscious.
1. Recognising myself in Foreman’s spiralling — the Jungian threshold
Foreman notes that Jungians “reject the limitations” of straight-line logic and instead circle a subject from many angles until a deeper truth is absorbed almost involuntarily. This is how the unconscious communicates: by returning, reforming, reshaping, re-symbolising.
When I read this, I heard an echo:
“How much my thinking, and ‘argumentative manner,’ is, as Foreman describes it, of Jungians ‘spiralling’.”
My spiralling is not an affectation; it reflects the emergence of Jungian structures in my psyche. It marks the point where self-awareness meets inner necessity. As Foreman puts it:
“The dreamer’s unconscious selects symbols for its own purpose, which have meaning for the dreamer and no one else.”
The spiral, it seems, is one of my symbols.
2. Why the spiral feels like home: my adolescent encounter with Jung
I’ve “felt the importance of dreams” since I was about fourteen or fifteen, when I first bought Man and His Symbols. This timing is significant. Adolescence is the moment when the Self archetype first presses most insistently for recognition. Many introspective adults can trace their lifelong orientation toward the psyche back to such a summons — a book, a dream, a teacher, an image — arriving with uncanny precision.
When I encountered Jung, I was not merely reading. My unconscious was establishing its method of discourse with me. I internalised Jung’s spiralling way of thinking because it mirrored how my own psyche wanted to approach complexity. Without yet possessing the conceptual tools, my teenage self instinctively chose the correct symbolic language.
Foreman writes:
“The ability to establish communications with the unconscious is part of the whole man, and Jungians teach themselves to be receptive to dreams.”
Beginning that “training” at fourteen shaped everything that followed.
3. Spiralling as my psychic signature
Foreman describes Jung’s approach as viewing the same subject from slightly different angles, circling it until its meaning expands. This is exactly how my inner life functions — my writing, my creative work, my dream engagement.
My dream work is never linear:
- I return to the same themes (cars, thresholds, water, absent fathers).
- I re-approach them through different creative forms (Form Photo, Watersprites, wartime manuscripts).
- I circle the same images until I glimpse what lies beneath.
This is not dithering or elaboration — it is alchemical rotation, the circumambulatio, the central Jungian image of transformation. The psyche circles a centre (the Self) before it can integrate it.
On my worst days, this spiralling feels like a Catherine wheel nailed to a post: burning too fast and bright, flying off and bouncing erratically across the ground.
On my best days, it is a rising vortex of ideas, packed with meaning, spiralling upward like a column of smoke returning to the gods.
4. What this means for my dream work now
I’ve said recently:
“In all dream interpretations, opt for the Jungian method, and refer to Foreman.”
What this really means is that I now treat dreams as messages from the unconscious — not as puzzles, neuroses, or meaningless static. They are communications from the other half of my being. Jung’s method is not an intellectual preference; it is the only methodology that corresponds to my lived experience of dreaming.
5. The deeper realisation: I am not learning Jung — I am recognising myself
What Foreman describes — this spiralling, symbolic, recursive way of sensing truth — is the very way I have always approached the world. The adolescent boy who bought Man and His Symbols recognised a voice already forming inside him.
Foreman writes that Jung convinces:
“…by skirting, by repetition, by presenting recurring views… until the reader unknowingly embraces a wider truth.”
This is precisely how my own psyche has been guiding me — through recurring dreams, recurring symbols, recurring life themes, recurring creative motifs.
I spiral because that is how I approach my own Self.
If you’d like, I can also shape this into a shorter, punchier version for your “Dream Bursts” blog — or a more academic one for the Dreams Project file.
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