The Horse
Instinctive force, which carries.
The Horse: what does it mean in analytical psychology?
In Symbols of Transformation Jung read the horse as the instinctive energy that carries the rider, and as the animal psyche that sees and knows what the rider does not, like the horses of myth that speak and warn. It is ambivalent: steed of the sun and of death, and, as the one who bears the rider, a form of the mother.
The Horse: where does it appear in myth and tradition?
Pegasus, the horses of the sun’s chariot, Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of Odin, Falada, the horse’s head that speaks in the Grimms’ tale, and the chariot of the soul with its two horses in Plato’s Phaedrus.
In the Press’s Books
The story that Nietzsche’s collapse in Turin in January 1889 came as he threw his arms around a beaten horse is often told, though it rests on later report.
From the Sources
Jung reads hero and horse together as an image of humanity with its repressed libido, in which the horse takes on the meaning of the animal unconscious, domesticated and subject to the will of man.
“The hero and the horse appear to us in this setting like an artistic formation of the idea of humanity with its repressed libido, whereby the horse acquires the significance of the animal unconscious, which appears domesticated and subjected to the will of man.”
Dr. C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, Part II, Chapter VI, "The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother". Authorized translation, with introduction, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D.; New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1916. The text, read in part
Pliny records that Alexander's horse Bucephalus, once equipped with the royal trappings, would let no one but Alexander mount it.
“When it was equipped with the royal trappings, it would suffer no one except Alexander to mount it, although at other times it would allow any one to do so.”
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, Vol. II, Book VIII, Chapter 64, "The Nature of the Horse". Translated, with copious notes and illustrations, by the late John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., and H. T. Riley, Esq., B.A.; London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, MDCCCLV (Project Gutenberg eBook #60230). The text, read in part
Each passage is quoted from the text named, which the press fetched and read, and was checked word for word against a fresh copy of it; the link opens that copy. Passages are given as printed, without the editors’ footnote numbers, and with words broken across lines joined.
Where to Read
- Symbols of Transformation, CW 5
- “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales,” CW 9i
Jung’s writings are cited by the volume of the Collected Works (CW), Bollingen Series / Princeton, 1953–79.
Related Symbols
Also among Beasts
“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analysing a dream.”
Cite This Entry
“The Horse.” In Symbols of the Psyche, the Symbolarium. The Thinking Press, 2026. https://thethinkingpress.org/symbolarium/psyche/horse.
Nearby in the alphabet: The Hexagram: Two triangles joined: fire and water in one. The House: The structure of the psyche, lived in. Ice: Feeling frozen; life held still.