The animal god
"In our western world, the fixation of the process of separation from our instinctual/archetypal lives has been pronounced, resulting in overly intellectualized, sublimated, and devitalized removal from ourselves and our depths", Stanton Marlan writes in his book C.G.Jung and the alchemical imagination (2021). While the separation of consciousness from instinct is necessary for development of consciousness of the kind we know, the separation may cause dangerous and unbearable alienation if there is no kind of reunion between the individual and the instinctual and archetypal layers of the psyche. Jung and many jungian analysts have described how encounters with animals in dreams and visions may symbolically represent attempts of the psyche to reestablish a connection between the conscious mind and the unconscious. The animal is a symbol for the part of the psyche which goes down into the subhuman and yet reaches above everyday consciousness, to the animal god. In an individ