Riflessioni sulla classificazione simbolica dualistica. Da "yin-yang" ad "anima-animus"

As is known, symbolic thinking is inherent to man, and is prior to any form of language. Symbols show traits of reality that cannot be compared to any other means of knowledge. Therefore, the analysis and investigation of a culture’s symbolic form allows the most obscure and enigmatic features of its tradition to be revealed, but can also be useful in understanding the hermeneutic dynamics of particular cases. Given this, the purpose of the present article is to briefly illustrate some aspects of symbolic thought and, in particular, dualistic symbolic classification, starting from the Chinese yin-yang dichotomy and arriving at the interpretation of Jung’s theory of the anima and animus, which takes its inspiration from that dichotomy’s implications