The use of allegory as a defense continues today in the interpretations of dreams and fantasies. When images no longer surprise us, when we can expect what they mean and know what they intend, it is because we have our ‘symbologies’ of established meanings. Dreams have been yoked to the systems which interpret them; they belong to schools – there are ‘Freudian dreams,’ ‘Jungian dreams,’ etc. If long things are penises for Freudians, dark things are shadows for Jungians. Images are turned into predefined concepts such as passivity, power, sexuality, anxiety, femininity, much like the conventions of allegorical poetry. Like such poetry, and using similar allegorical techniques, psychology too can become a defense against the psychic power of personified images.

If the mother in our dream, or the beloved, ar the wise counselor, says and does what one would expect, or if the analyst iterprets these figures conventionally, they have been deprived of their authority as mythic images and persons and reduced to mere allegorical conventions and moralistic stereotypes. They have become the personified conceits of an allegory, a simple means of persuasion that forces the dream or fantasy into doctrinal compliance. The image allegorized is now the image in service of a teaching.

In contrast, archetypal psychology holds that the true iconoclast is the image itself which explodes its allegorical meanings, releasing startling new insights. Thus the most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The ‘worst’ images are thus the best, for they are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul.

James Hillman Re-Visioning, 8

Have we in book arts, come some way along the path of turning our field into an allegory, thus limiting its power to cross boundaries and do its work of transformation in culture? What would the remedy be? Where should we turn for palliative/transformational images of what the work is?

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