Beyond Jung – Encountering the Eco-symbolic: A Jungian approach to the discovery of meaningfulness in the other-than-human world

As those working in outdoor settings will testify, profound experiences can emerge from the dynamic interaction between an individual and the phenomena of the natural environment. These moments of meaning, where psyche experiences itself reflected in the other-than-human world, can hold profound personal significance, might lead to important therapeutic insight and may even inspire a sense of interconnectedness with the containing ecosystem. To explore how Jung’s concept of the symbol can help us understand such encounters, I follow his thinking from the symbolically constellated and ‘undifferentiated’ worldview of his ‘primitive’ man to the ‘transpsychic reality’ underlying the psyche, as revealed by his researches into synchronicity. With reference to my own experience of working therapeutically in outdoor settings and my recent research into the symbol-like content found in immersive engagement with the natural environment, I consider how a Jungian approach can offer us an effective framework for the ‘eco-symbolic’ and might, ultimately, guide us to discover a more ecosystemically integrated sense of self.

Gillian M Brown is a psychotherapist and nature-based counsellor and educator with a longstanding interest in the field of ecopsychology. She has a PhD from the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex where she researched the application of the Jungian concept of the symbol to meaningful encounters with other-than-human phenomena. Her paper ‘The tree that called my name: on the significance of encountering the constellated symbol in the natural, other-than-human, world’ was published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology’s special edition on our environmental and climate crisis and she is the author of ‘In Nature’s embrace: Emotional emplacement and the search for an ‘eco-symbolic’’, a chapter based on her conference presentation for the C. G. Jung Institute in Switzerland, in Routledge’s 2025 ‘Jungian and interdisciplinary interfaces between emotions individual and collective trauma’. An emeritus member and former Chair of the Cambridge Jungian Circle, Gillian remains active in the organisation and is a co-facilitator of the circle’s ‘Eco-Jung’ discussion group.