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.
Development
1918
developed by Ernest Jones
Jones's paper gave the classic account of 'true symbolism', setting it apart from metaphor and from the broader usage of Jung and Silberer.
In The Theory of Symbolism (1918)
1930
developed by Melanie Klein
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.
In The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego (1930)
1957
reworked by Hanna Segal
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.
In Dream, Phantasy and Art (1991);Notes on Symbol Formation (1957)
Relations
- 1918 developed by Ernest Jones
Jones's paper gave the classic account of 'true symbolism', setting it apart from metaphor and from the broader usage of Jung and Silberer.
- 1918 derives from Repression
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.
- 1930 developed by Melanie Klein
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.
- 1957 reworked by Hanna Segal
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.
Works
- 1918
Ernest Jones's "The Theory of Symbolism" (British Journal of Psychology, 1918) expands a paper he read to the British Psychological Society in January 1916, and was reprinted the same year in the second edition of his Papers on Psycho-Analysis. It is the classic statement of the psychoanalytic theory of the symbol. Its aim is to separate symbolism in the strict psychoanalytic sense from the many other kinds of indirect or figurative representation — metaphor, simile, emblem, allegory — that ordinary usage also calls symbolic. Jones begins with the broad sense of the word, in which the growth of civilisation is itself a chain of symbolisms: interest passes from primitive ideas to more complex ones, and older symbolic beliefs are later exposed as such. He lists traits shared by all symbols: they stand for another idea, share some attribute with it, are concrete and sensory, belong to early stages of both individual and species, express something hidden, and arise spontaneously. He then argues that true symbolism is set apart by its relation to the unconscious. Building on Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs's account of 1913, he restates its criteria. A true symbol represents unconscious material. Its meaning stays nearly constant across dreams, myths, jokes and different people. It is not fixed by individual factors alone: a person may choose or invent symbols but cannot give an established symbol a private meaning. It has a developmental basis. The history of words regularly preserves a link between symbol and symbolised; his extended example is the etymology of Punchinello. And it has parallels in myth, cult and religion. Against Jung, he holds that symbols are not inherited ready-made but recreated by each individual, and that their uniformity reflects the uniformity of basic human interests. Symbols run into thousands, but by his estimate the ideas they stand for number under a hundred. All of these ideas concern the bodily self, the closest relatives, or birth, love and death. Most are sexual, and the male organ probably has more symbols than all other ideas together. When such a meaning is revealed, consciousness reacts with surprise, disbelief and often repugnance. On the genesis of symbolism Jones asks two questions: why the mind equates ideas that consciousness finds unlike, and why the equation runs in one direction only. To the first, he answers that the primitive tendency to identify owes less to intellectual incapacity, the usual explanation, which he finds in Pelletier, Jung and Silberer. It owes more to two principles. The pleasure principle attends to what matters to the subject and favours the easier perception of likeness. The reality principle assimilates the new to the familiar. Drawing on the Swedish philologist Hans Sperber's theory that sexual interest shaped early speech, he explains why tools are male symbols and worked material female. On that theory, words that accompanied communal labour first named sexual acts. He reads sublimation as the individual's repetition of this desexualising process. To the second question, he answers that the symbolised ideas are the most primary and the most deeply repressed in the mind. Energy flows from them and never towards them, and the symbol is a compromise formation between repressed and repressing forces. Hence only what is repressed gets symbolised, and only the repressed has any need of it, a principle Jones calls the touchstone of the psychoanalytic theory. The longest section, on "functional symbolism", criticises the writers he calls post-psychoanalytic, chiefly Herbert Silberer and Jung, for diluting the concept. Jones reviews four parts of Silberer's work: the auto-symbolic phenomena, the division into material and functional symbolism, the appeal to apperceptive insufficiency, and the anagogic reading of symbols. He argues that when a patient or theorist reads a symbol as standing for an abstract tendency (power, wisdom, overcoming one's old self), this is usually a form of resistance. The abstract idea and the symbol descend side by side from the same unconscious source; they are not related as the symbolised and its symbol. His examples include: - the serpent as an emblem of wisdom; - the wedding ring as emblem rather than symbol; - amulets; - gold and wealth; - the sceptre; - the nineteenth-century reinterpretation of phallic worship as reverence for creative power. Progress in knowledge, as from the sun conceived as an eye to modern astronomy, comes from gradually renouncing symbolic equivalences, not from symbols themselves. Symbols are rather a barrier to progress, as neurotic symptoms show. The conclusion separates symbolism in the broad sense from symbolism proper. The general function of symbolism in the broad sense is to overcome an inhibition of feeling by regressing to a concrete, sensory mode. If the regression stops at the conscious or preconscious level, the result is metaphor; if it reaches the unconscious, the result is a true symbol. In metaphor the feeling is over-sublimated, in the symbol under-sublimated. The essay became the standard reference for the strict psychoanalytic concept of the symbol, and Melanie Klein and later Hanna Segal built on it in their accounts of symbol formation.
- 1930
The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego
A paper Melanie Klein read at the Oxford Congress of 1929 and published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1930. Klein argues that anxiety is what drives symbol formation: the child's sadistic phantasies against the mother's body make the objects of that body feared, so the child's interest shifts to new objects that come to stand for them, and in this way the child's world grows wider. She illustrates the argument with the analysis of "Dick", a four-year-old boy whose excessive early defence against his own sadism had all but stopped symbol formation and, with it, his relation to reality.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Theory of Symbolism1918Evidence for a relation
- Dream, Phantasy and Art1991Evidence for a relation
- Notes on Symbol Formation1957Evidence for a relation
- The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego1930Evidence for a relation