[302] Reflective symbols ^aare symbols used in our reflexive [sic] and dealing with empirical reality. This can be, in the technical realm---red or green light at the corner of the street; it can be in language--- words which are so much defined that they have only one meaning; letters which we use in order to write words; mathematical signs, which are called "symbols" with a special emphasis, and often with a kind of mystical feeling, as if they represented more than their definition says: I myself felt so, very much.

when I first learned at school about the root of minus one, which is of course an impossible and very mysterious thing! But it is nothing but the definition the mathematician gives to it; it is not a representative symbol^b for the mystical depth of reality, but is a reflective symbol to calculating a higher mathematics. Then the words [sic.] is used very much for psychological symbols^c. I would also call them signs and not symbols, i.e. the contents of dreams, the contents of the unconscious which comes out in the associations of the room of the psychoanalyst. These are called symbols-of-the-unconscious. They use material of the conscious world, but they express something else than what these things mean, in the context of the consciousness. They mean relationships to parents, they mean feelings of hate,

of despair, of fear, etc. They mean something which in their reality they don't mean at all, where only some slight connotations abuse [?] this character. They are signs for the state of the unconscious. But they do not represent anything else than the state of the unconscious. Therefore I would suggest--- but hopelessly, and so I had better not do it!--- that they shouldn't be called symbols either, they should be signs of the unconscious, and nothing else.