Concept
Symbolism
In psychoanalysis, the representation of a repressed idea by a substitute whose meaning is largely constant across individuals and cultures and unknown to the person who uses it, as in dreams, myths, folklore and symptoms. In the strict sense it is set apart from metaphor and other conscious figurative speech: the symbolised ideas concern the body, kin, birth, love and death, and only what is repressed comes to be symbolised.
Read more- Narrower concepts
- Symbolic equation
- Key works
- 4
- Related
- Repression
developed by
- Ernest Jones 1918 Jones's paper gave the classic account of 'true symbolism', setting it apart from metaphor and from the broader usage of Jung and Silberer.
- Melanie Klein 1930 Through the analysis of Dick, Klein argues that anxiety about sadistic phantasies drives the child to move its interest from the mother's body to ever new objects. Symbol formation is therefore the basis of the child's relation to the outside world, and of its sublimations.
derives from
- Repression 1918 In Jones's account, true symbolism arises only from repressed ideas, which is why it runs in one direction, from the repressed to its substitute.
reworked by
- Hanna Segal 1957 Taking Ernest Jones's theory of symbolism as her starting point, Segal treated the symbol as a relation between ego, object and symbol and widened the concept beyond what is repressed: she distinguished the concrete symbolic equation of psychotic thinking from the true symbol, formed through mourning in the depressive position, on which sublimation, thought and communication depend.