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Man and His Symbols: why I do not delete the step nobody can explain

Carl Gustav Jung and others · 1964
10 de enero de 2026 por
Man and His Symbols: why I do not delete the step nobody can explain
Andrés Briñez

Jung wrote the first chapter and handed the rest to four collaborators: individuation, ancient myth, symbolism in visual art, and one complete clinical case. It is popular writing from an author who almost never did any, and it shows in the care he takes explaining what his other books assume.

What I took from it

That what people do without being able to explain it is not necessarily irrational. Every process walkthrough turns up a step nobody justifies: a form printed, signed and filed that no one ever reads; an approval the system already enforces; a paper copy kept for two years. The immediate temptation is to mark it as waste and delete it from the diagram.

That step almost always holds up something nobody wrote down: an old mistrust with a date and a name attached, a control that was lost once, a division of responsibility nobody wants to state out loud. The criterion I have worked with since is that an unexplained step is a question, not an error. Before proposing to remove it, I ask who it protects, and fairly often it protects the person describing it to me.

The same goes for a company's private vocabulary. When everyone says "the folder" or "the sheet" and nobody knows why, there is history buried there worth digging up before renaming anything in a new system.

What I left out

All the rest, which is most of it: dreams, archetypes, art symbolism, the collective unconscious. It is a book of depth psychology, not of management, and hasty translations of Jung into business usually end in motivational talks with mandalas. I read it for what it is and took one applicable idea, which for a thousand-page book is a fair return.

The Art of Being Right: a catalogue of tricks, for recognising them
Arthur Schopenhauer · written around 1830, published posthumously
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