ColorAcademy 2005 - Psychology

Colour Symbolism
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There are remarkable differences between the concepts of psychological colour-symbolism as interpreted by Freud, Jung, and other psychologists.

For Freud, the symbol was loaded with trauma. As soon as the meaning of a symbol was understood it was no longer a symbol having ventilated its disturbance.

An example of colour symbolism in Freudian analysis was the case of the soldier from the first World War who suffered from psychosomatic colour blindness. He was induced to remember in a dream green crabs crawling over the trenches and was further encouraged to remember a painful situation in early childhood when he saw his mother drop a green crab into boiling water. There was a piercing whistle and the green crab turned to red. From that moment onwards, he suffered from red-green colour blindness. He was cured by abreaction, that is to say, by remembering not just the incident but also ventilating all the emotions associated with it. Freud also thought in terms of universal symbols.

While he saw colours in dreams as repetitions of colours seen and remembered from the day before, he also showed that symbolic colours in dreams were superego manifestations. For example, a young boy dreamt of the holy grail and in this dream a crimson light streamed from it and seared his eyes. The searing of his eyes, according to Freud, was a castrating punishment for viewing the primal scene, as well as indulging in passive masochistic surrender.

Jung, on the other hand, considered that the psychological symbol was an attempt to
elucidate by analogy what was as yet unknown and still in process of formation. In other words, the symbol was both charged with psychic meaning and in the process of developing and moving towards solving a dilemma. In Jung's great works, the Psychology of Alchemy and the Mysterium Coniunctionis, he describes the developmental process in alchemical terms passing from the Blackening or Melanosis to the Whitening or Leucosis and from the Xanthosis or Yellowing to the Iosis, the Reddening.

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