Get parent of symbolic link instead of original folder
Unfortunately, this is not how symbolic links work.  

From the man page (man ln)


  The ln utility creates a new directory entry (linked file) for the
  file name specified by target_file.  The target_file will be created
  with the same file modes as the source_file.  It is useful for
  maintaining multiple copies of a file in many places at once without
  using up storage for the “copies”; instead, a link “points” to the
  original copy.


Emphasis mine

So, how do you get around this?  Use an environment variable.  For example:

$ mkdir -p /a/b/c
$ FOO='/a/b/c'
$ cd ~
$ cd $FOO
$ pwd
/a/b/c


Note, you should use absolute paths when doing this; using relative paths can and will have unintended consequences.