The Theory of Symbolism

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.