Symbols serve communication between men. As denizens at the fringes of memory, symbols serve communication between the remembered past and the present. When placed in the context of myths and legend, whether written, spoken, or transposed into pictures or stained glass, symbols become tools of communication between generations and as a source of identities and ethics for men in societies.

Mutual influences of cultural shading and latent content produce variations in the manifest symbolic forms of dreams and myths. In primitive societies this interaction skews manifest dream symbols in the direction of serving cultural needs. In modern dreaming, manifest dream symbols, containing personal and idiosyncratic content, predominate.

Transcendent symbols are represented to have an universal spiritual power that evokes affects and motivates actions in men. They are the weapons of gods.

The presence of thinking disorders in works of art may be interpreted to be a disorder of the symbolizing function signifying the intrusion of disease into an artist’s work.