The concept of the symbol shows the way to overcome RenC Descartes' partition of man into the self as res cogitans and the body as yes extensa. I n the symbol psychological meaning and physical sign appear as a unit. We find the personality of a human being in the meaning of his words and actions, habits and gestures, and we experience this meaning as being identical with its bodily bearer, resembling the unity of symbol and meaning. Klages' in his studies of expression, Spranger,2 in his Verstehende Psychologie of personality apply this concept of the symbol. It is unnecessary to probe the justification of these authors for their application of it because for our point of view a different use is central. Symbols are not only a model for the unity of body and mind of people as they present themselves to us outwardly in their behavior and appearance. Symbols also provide a method of understanding this unity from within as it is reflected in the constitution of personality. This paper is based on the hypothesis that all emergence of psyche or experience in man and animal is associated with sign systems in the function of a symbolic medium just as human thought is linked with language.Apart from its task in the communication with other people, language, in inner virtual speech, acts as the medium for comprehending and reflecting experience in thought. Only with the help of a symbolic sign system in the form of language is man able to rise above the immediacy of his emotions and perceptions toward the supremacy of reason and the experience of an objective world of facts. The central nervous system is a communication system that transforms the excitations of the sense organs and the signals received through hormones and other chemical substances into the code of its own excitations. Through these coded excitations it steers the actions and reactions of the organism. The central nervous system also enables the organism to decode the excitations generated in these vital communication processes. Through the latter process the organism discloses to itself in living experience, that is, in emotions and perceptions, the significance of its own situation and the character of its environment. Just as the decoding of words yields meaning, thc decoding of excitations within the central nervous system yields perceptions, emotions, and imagery: that is, the phenomena of mental life.Language ranks highest in the hierarchy of the internal sign systems, which are superimposed in layers Upon each other in the course of evolution. The lowest level of communication processes corresponds to those of the somatic periphery, of the sense organs, peripheral nerves, and muscles, and is directly related to palpable reality. On the level of the vertebrates the neural canal is

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